YEA FOR SURE… the answer is obvious. It does not matter whom we talk about a doctor, nurse, medical facility, labs, diagnostic services, pharmacies:
Everyplace we look for a trusted, reliable relationship. In the lovely old days, we used to live in the same place for all of our life, the level of migration to a different house in the town, let alone the state, country, or globe was rare.
We all had Dr. John as a family doctor for the whole family and nurse Jane helping the doctor for delivery of services. They used to do everything for you from taking your samples for labs to dispensing pharmacy. A single point of service was what it was all about.
For more significant problems requiring surgeries (not the smaller ones done at the doctor’s office itself) we could go to specific places providing those services in the next door big town.
You paid from your pocket, friends and families helped, doctors office used to charge minimal and even offering charitable services to the ones who could not afford.
None of us knew what was going on; we had full trust in the doctor equating to GOD. There was no Google for us to google to learn and debate options. The confidence built over generations and with close friends and family experiences always stayed with us.
Wow, those all sound like things from a few centuries ago. Doctor’s offices slowly vanished and took the shape of bigger nursing homes with multiple doctors and nurses to much larger hospitals in pretty much any town of any significance. Insurance companies came in replacing friends and families. This transformation did not happen because we suddenly needed more complex healthcare, so why it changed?
With all of the above came a limited circle of friends and family who can take care of us, resulting in a gap. These new entities filling the vacuum did not have the same goal for existence as your Dr. John and family friends. It became more driven by profits and return-on-investment (nothing wrong in that when in moderation) instead of a model of bartering system of favors among a closely-knit bunch of people.
Powered by knowledge from Google we got more demanding on how we want our healthcare delivered concerning quality and quantity, but we started missing the trust we used to have. We are trying to develop this trust factor using the review system and grading system by a much global set of people using services providing experiences beyond family and friends in our decision making ( Risk is the reliability of reviews).
The reality is we are still looking for a competent, reliable, trustworthy set of people providing cost-effective service. Maybe that is the reason we are seeing some of healthcare technological initiatives and solutions taking us to a cooperative model cutting the overhead and red tape of intermediaries.
Solutions where providers can pool up on a platform and provide complete care to patients with minimal time spent on paperwork and provide healthcare using a combination of patient’s self-managed and remote care techniques. Using informatics with the state of the art technologies of today as a reference here that can produce quality cost-effective healthcare cutting on red tape and demand-supply issue by making system more efficient with platform solutions like healthcare solution.