Patient-Centered care: Putting people over profit | Opinion
Since the pandemic began, waiting has become the distinct feature of many experiences. At restaurants, you now wait longer for your meal. You order a refrigerator, then wait nine months for it to arrive. As a clinician founder and co-owner of Aquarian Clinic Direct Primary Care, I do what I can to minimize how long my patients wait for care. Unfortunately, what happened with this patient is far too common.
At 29-years old, she lives with Crohn’s disease, a condition that inflames the bowels and can cause severe gastrointestinal and systemic symptoms. This brought her to my clinic in January.
Her Crohn’s had been giving her a lot of trouble and the medications she had been taking weren’t as effective as she’d hoped. Worse, she said, the current medication caused harsh side effects. Not only was she having to endure Crohn’s, but she was also suffering added symptoms caused by her medication. Together, she and I worked to identify one that might work better for her.
I prescribed the new medication in January, the same month she enrolled in care. We finally got her medications in October, 10 months later.
Why? Insurers’ red tape and bureaucracy are frequently unnecessary and excessively burdensome. Instead of making treatment easier for patients, step therapy and prior authorization tend to have the opposite effect. They delay patients’ access to needed medications and saddle healthcare providers with paperwork, exacerbating burnout while also undermining the providers professional opinion.
At 17, over 20 years ago, I began working in healthcare at a local Tallahassee hospital. I processed insurance claims, then worked for the state of Florida writing insurance summary of benefits. I found myself asking, “Why are we spending so much time and money checking boxes instead of directly helping patients?”
The failure of our current system: it doesn’t focus directly on the patient outcome. Insurers say that coverage decisions are built around cost savings. That explanation doesn’t hold up, though. If that were true, insurers would embrace patient-centered care.
Benefits of patient-centered care shows improved treatment outcomes by allowing access to medications, diagnostics, and devices. It relieves providers of headache-inducing red tape. And it even benefits insurers: improved time-to-treatment for patients generates fewer downstream costs and better health outcomes.
Florida is taking steps in the right direction. This past legislative session, a bill that limits insurers’ use of step therapy was passed and signed into law. More is needed, though. Our healthcare system is already significantly burdened, and insurers’ profit-prioritizing delay tactics do it no favors.
By moving to adopt more policies that encourage patient-centered care, Florida can improve patients’ quality of life while saving money. Who knows? Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, patients may have easier access to the best treatments for them, and they won’t be stuck in this situation of painful waiting.
We are proud to be moving in the right direction, offering Direct Primary Care, a new model of medicine that focuses on the patient and minimizes barriers to care. Let’s focus on accessible, affordable healthcare, check out our solution to access at AquarianClinic.com.
Taylor Ann Drew, APRN, is a Tallahassee native. A nurse practitioner, she is co-owner and founder of Aquarian Clinic.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Patient-Centered care: Putting people over profit | Opinion
