Who’s in charge of your health?

Over the past 50 years, the leadership in US medicine has shifted from doctors to businesspeople, academics, and government bureaucrats.

Businesspeople focus primarily on making money and keeping the business solvent, which is why primary care doctors are expected to see lots of patients quickly and efficiently. Leaders who are less aware of what goes on in the exam room at times cut corners, choosing cost savings over quality of patient care. Doctors feel trapped in unsafe care situations and more and more their concerns are unheeded.

Ultimately, making money is the most important thing, patient care is secondary, and physician wellbeing is far behind in the list of priorities.

Government entities try their best to create a safety net, to use tax dollars well to keep the workforce healthy and the poor cared for. They tend to employ a lot of people, many of them administrators of various programs, and at the top of the org chart are elected people. Auditors and leaders are often suspicious that wasteful things are happening and they should be able to save money if they can just crack down on the inefficient people. They constantly demand reports, which causes the few people with boots on the ground to have to do extra busywork preparing reports with inadequate patient panel lists and broken EHRs, which translates into less time to care for patients and a lot of frustration. Highly political illnesses get extra funding to the detriment of boring, old, common, uncool diseases. The final result is underfunded clinics with long wait times for specialty care, with a significant exodus of high quality clinicians. There are definitely the few, the proud, strong mission-driven doctors who endure the pain of government shenanigans for their entire career, The government tries its best, bless its heart, but it just can’t get out of its own way.

How Pay for Performance hurts patients

All of these models also embrace a “Pay for Performance” paradigm which inadvertently punishes doctors for seeing less desirable patients. Non-English speakers slow you down. People living in poverty have higher BMIs and less positive outcomes. People living with mental illness don’t follow their doctors’ directions perfectly every time (or ever) and often have poorer health numbers compared with their mentally healthy peers. Such patients make doctors look bad on paper. Doctors are incentivized to offload them.

The Healing Grove Way: Putting you in charge!

The beauty of Healing Grove Health Center is that it will be disconnected from insurance and government. This is key because we can live fully in the Kingdom of Heaven. We can answer to God, not a boss with a divided agenda. We can fully serve the true needs of our patients – their physical, spiritual, emotional, and cultural needs, without the distraction of colon cancer screening reports or 15 minute appointments. All of our patients are created in the image of God, each one deserves excellent care. We can have a singular focus on patient care. Thank you for supporting this beautiful and important ministry!!!

The Healing Grove Solution!

At Healing Grove Health Center, we position ourselves outside of the broken medical system and keep our panel sizes low so that we can take excellent care of each of our patients.  We offer concierge medicine services for a monthly fee, cutting out the middle man (insurance companies and their interests) and allowing us the luxury of focusing entirely on you, the patient.  We answer the phone, we get to know you and your family, we understand your personality and your goals, and we can tailor your medical care to do what is right for you.  We have same day appointments and even weekend and holiday appointments when needed, to keep our patients out of urgent cares, ERs, and hospitals as much as possible.  We also have the flexibility to work within the system when needed for specialty care.

Try Healing Grove out! Schedule an appointment today!

Questions?  Call or text us at 408.459.4443.