(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- This fall, Dr. Timothy Wong opened the doors to iHealth Clinic, inviting patients for $35 walk-in appointments, seven days a week. The clinic’s hours are 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends. The sole staffer, he does everything from running the website to answering the phone to cleaning the exam room.
How’s business?
We’ve been open 18 weeks and have recently been pretty busy, with around 10 patients a day. Our busiest day was 24 patients, and the goal is to hit 20 per day.
Do you believe in health insurance?
Insurance is actually quite important. When I was younger, I actually had my lung collapse spontaneously, so insurance was a good thing. Who knows, you might get appendicitis or slip on ice—random occurrences and bad luck, you know? We all need catastrophic insurance of some sort.
Then why don’t you accept it at iHealth?
Primary care is generally pretty cheap: We don’t need operating rooms or fancy equipment. Because the costs are so low, having insurance cover primary care is an inefficiency.
How so?
Staffing is our biggest cost after doctors’ salaries, and the administrative burden has actually increased in the last 5 to 6 years. A study found that a primary-care provider in Ontario, Canada, requires $20,000 worth of staff a year to communicate with their single-payer health-care system. In America it’s four times as high, $80,000, to communicate continuously with insurance companies.
What do you call your model?
Direct-access primary care. We don’t have memberships or obstacles, and we don’t screen patients. My goal is to promote this model and create a platform for other doctors, because if other providers do this, I think it could really change the health-care system for better.
Would doctor salaries be lower?
Probably not as high as in traditional medicine, but we also cut out the biggest headache, which is going through an inch of insurance paperwork every day. It’s much more satisfying to just work with patients.
What happens if patients need lab work?
I just hit 600 patients, and I think I’ve requested maybe 30 orders of blood work and 10 radiological tests. You really don’t need too much testing—a lot of the time I do urgent-care work.
Is testing expensive?
We have a contract with Quest Diagnostics. The discount is quite significant. I had a patient who had a routine cholesterol test and CBC [complete blood count], and she would have paid $230, but with my contract she paid $30.
What do you want all your patients to know?
Complex systems, even the most eloquent and efficient, will never match an inefficient simple system. It’s much easier to manage and operate a simple system with no moving parts and few steps. We’re creating too complex of a system. I think we need to really focus on simplicity in medicine again.
What do patients think of iHealth?
Patient satisfaction is just incredible. We have five-star Google reviews. I have people walking in that aren’t even patients just to say, “Thank you for what you’re doing.” I’ve had patients tip me! I’ve never heard of a doctor getting a tip.
To contact the author of this story: Arianne Cohen in New York at arianne@gmail.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Silvia Killingsworth at skillingswo2@bloomberg.net
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