Want to Fix Health Care? Try Something New.

Does this sound familiar?

Call your doctor to make an appointment. Find out the next appointment is two weeks away. 

The discomfort you’re experiencing isn’t something you’re prepared to live with, so you head to a walk-in clinic.

Enter drab clinic space with worn carpets, harried front desk staff and doctors churning through patients to keep the fee machine going. Sit in the waiting room for a spell, then have a brief chat with a doc to get a lab requisition and maybe a prescription.

Check the Calgary lab services booking system and discover the next available appointment is four weeks away. Decide to take your chances on a walk up.

Drive for 20 minutes over to the nearest lab and wait for three hours in another drab waiting room full of sick people. Get the poke and wait for results.

Given your symptoms, the doctor already provided a prescription. Drive to a pharmacy, drop off the script and wander the aisles for 15 minutes looking at stuff you don’t need while waiting for the pharmacy to get your pills ready. That’s if you’re lucky. Odds are the pharmacist tells you to come back in an hour or two.

Total time in waiting rooms and driving around: 4, maybe 5 hours. Total time interacting with the physician, phlebotomist and pharmacist? Maybe 15 or 20 minutes.

Does this seem right?

Let’s ask another question: what’s your time worth?

What if you could connect with your care team at any time, secure a quick virtual appointment with a practitioner from your phone, have a phlebotomist visit your home or office to collect a sample, and have your medicine delivered to your doorstep?

Sound better?

It seems like a no brainer, yet most of us are still dealing with the same antiquated health system our parents experienced. Imagine banks still operated this way, and you had to stand in line waiting for a teller on pay day. Technology has transformed the delivery of financial services, so why is health care still stuck in the last century?

Some executive health clinics have been offering a better, more personalized clinic experience over the past couple decades. They charge $4,000 or more for the privilege. That’s a luxury most of us can’t afford.

The good news is that more affordable alternatives are starting to spring up. A few companies are offering virtual care, and several online pharmacies have appeared in the past five years. Most of these platforms are strictly online, meaning you never actually see a health care provider in person. There’s no continuity of care, and the system isn’t integrated. But now a Calgary company, Scrubs Health, is offering a more pleasurable patient journey with human touch points, for affordable fees.

Wait. Fees? Isn’t health care “free” in Canada?

Nothing is free, except time with your family and friends and adventures in nature. But you pay for health care through your taxes. You pay dearly, in fact. And since what you pay isn’t tied directly to results, you end up with suboptimal service.

This is where the dialogue gets interesting.. Recently, we had Ottawa and the provinces and the press getting excited about a new deal, whereby Ottawa sends more of your tax dollars to the provinces for health care, and the provinces agree to share your health information with Ottawa and invest the new tax dollars in better health care.

Haven’t we heard variations of this before?

What if, instead, we unleashed the private sector to try a few things differently? Like reform the clinic experience. What if we used technology to make it easier to get the care you need? Why can we order toilet paper to our home with Amazon, but can’t get medical care that way? Isn’t our health more important than TP-on-demand?

The problem is that offering a better customer experience requires investment, and since our system is set up to pay doctors and the doctors in turn create the clinic experience out of their government fees, we end up with the bare minimum in service. There’s no incentive for docs to invest in all the infrastructure needed to deliver a great customer experience.

So the first thing we should embrace is the idea of paying a few bucks to get better care; more convenience, faster results, and lower gas bills. The Defenders of Public Health shouldn’t stress about this. Fees go toward something the system doesn’t want to pay for when it comes to community care—the back office, the nurses, the customer care team and the software developers who work together to create a better experience for you.

Let’s face it: the government doesn’t care about customer service and our tax dollars get wasted by bureaucrats, middle managers with six-figure incomes but zero accountability when it comes to front-line results. Tried to get a passport recently? Process immigration papers?

But a bunch of private operators trying to win business and figuring out how to do things smarter? Yeah, they will bend over backwards to give you a great experience and hopefully secure another five-star Google review.