This is an excerpt from Florida Family Physician Journal, spring 2020.
My story is not unique.
I am a first-generation physician who chose family medicine for all the right reasons. After medical school, I returned to my hometown – hopes and dreams in tow – to practice medicine amongst family and friends.
I took the only paying job available with the local hospital where I worked for a few years before becoming fed up with the impersonal nature of the corporate health system. Of course, the “target patient numbers” and “metric-meeting” demands were no different in my small town than anywhere else, but they felt different when they affected the people I’d known since childhood.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew what I was getting into.
I trained in an era when my residency program prepared me for a typical 20-plus patient day on an EHR and when all of my mentors told me medicine had gone to hell. But what I found so surprisingly and inexcusably oppressive was the systematic disregard for physicians trying to solve their own problems and give better care.
I met all the corporate goals, saw all the patients, went to all the meetings, served on all the committees, and still, I was told my expectations for the health system were “unreasonably high.”
I went into Direct Primary Care (DPC) with the sole objective of “righting every wrong” of the corporate world.
