Local author helps readers understand healthcare system and why doctors don’t have enough time for us anymore

Do you remember when you last had a doctor — not a primary care physician or a PCP, but a doctor who knew you and your family and had time to talk to you? Remember when you called the doctor’s office and an actual secretary — who knew your name — answered the phone and was glad you called? Remember when you got to the doctor’s office, he sat across from you in a chair and seemed to have oodles of time to discuss your aches and pains?

Well kiddo, according to a book I just read, those days may be gone forever.

I personally am panicked that our family doctor, though younger than us, might retire while we are still around, because I know that in this day and age we will never have the same relationship with another doctor.

It is a new world out there in medical land — we can’t blame the doctors themselves; they, too, regret this situation. If you don’t learn the rules of the game, you are going to feel like you’re trying to get around in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and don’t have a map to get you where you need to go.
The good news? I know someone selling the map and she even speaks our language, not medical speak, but patient-speak.

Her name is Trisha Torrey and you might have seen her column in the Post Standard, “Every Patient’s Advocate,” or heard her Sunday morning radio show, “HealthLink on Air on WSYR.”

Torrey asks questions of people in the health care system that we don’t have the chance, or the nerve, to ask ourselves.

And now she has written an absolutely fantastic book titled “You Bet Your Life! The 10 Mistakes Every Patient Makes (How to Fix Them to Get the Health Care You Deserve.” In it Torrey explains what really drives the medical system and why it leaves us feeling like wanderers in a foreign land.

In the first few pages you will learn that the largest impact on your getting the care you need is the role that insurance companies play with medical providers (doctors, pharmacies, medical equipment providers, physical therapists, etc.,) Once you understand that, you can learn to become an educated consumer of medical services.

Torrey feels that, “with few exceptions, doctors must be business people before they are doctors.” We assume the doctor gets paid adequately for the time spent seeing us and making a diagnosis but that is truly the tip of the iceberg. The next time you’re in a medical office, look around.

Doctors need to pay for office space, medical assistants, nurses, clerical staff, billing staff, updating medical equipment, keeping the office clean, maintaining the medical equipment, purchasing and updating computer systems that contain our medical information and computer systems for insurance billing, buying and reading journals and attending conferences to keep their skills up to date with the latest information. The list goes on and on.

Regardless of the state of modern medicine, reimbursements to medical providers from insurance companies keep shrinking. Ten years ago doctors would see maybe 20 patients a day in the office and then another handful in the hospital. To earn the same amount of money today, they now need to see 30 to 40 patients a day! Given that there is still just a certain number of hours in a day, you can figure out for yourself how much time can be spent with each patient.

Once the points of view of the patient, the doctor and the insurance company are explained, we begin to understand the big picture. “You Bet Your Life!” then provides us with the tools to become an EmPowered Patient, an emPatient, by working within those constraints. An emPatient is one who works in concert with their doctor to assure that the diagnosis and treatment received are the correct ones.

Torrey shows us how to become an emPatient. By doing her self-analysis we can assess the type of patient we are and understand why that is important in choosing the doctors and treatments that are the best fit for us.

For instance, if you needed to find a new doctor, should you look for an MD, a DO, an ND or should you see a NP or a PA, instead of, or in addition to, having a PCP? (She explains the alphabet soup.) And how do you make those decision given your present health and insurance situation?

We (or someone who cares for us and has the time) need to become our own case manager. I know that when we are sick it is so much easier just to be told what to do than it is to have to make decisions and do some of the research on our own. But what I learned from Torrey’s book is that an extremely complex set of circumstances impacts the care we get and we have to become an emPatient to understand that reality in order to make good decisions for ourselves.

For example, Torrey feels that an emPatient must learn to communicate in a way that respects both the patient and the doctor. “Knowing that your time with the doctor will be limited, do your research in advance and make a very clear, concise list of questions ahead of time,” she advises. That doesn’t mean bringing in pages of articles from the Web that the doctor doesn’t have the time to read or gives the impression that your few hours of research is equal to her years of education and experience, but there is a middle ground.

How do you know when to listen to that little nagging voice in your head that tells you something is wrong even when a visit to the doctor doesn’t result in a diagnosis that feels like the right answer? In “You Bet Your Life…,” you become educated about your options and learn when to follow that “gut-feeling.”

Though there are definitely times you need to become a more assertive emPatient, Torrey tells us of the dangers in crossing that line into becoming an obnoxious patient or caregiver and finding yourself blacklisted in the medical community.

“Many doctors love that I am describing the intricacies of the system to patients,” says Torrey. “They are not insulted when patients ask for copies of their medical records to bring to specialists because it saves them time and insures that the records will be there when needed.”

In “You Bet Your Life! The 10 Mistakes Every Patient Makes,” you will become versed in why learning how to “follow the money” helps you to use the system better so you can become a better patient.

“You Bet Your Life! The 10 Mistakes Every Patient Makes” is available at Creekside Books in Skaneateles, local Barnes and Noble stores, Amazon.com and the book’s Web site: YouBetYourLifeBooks.com.