I quit my job as a pediatrician, so I can practice medicine.

This is my WHY.

I have always had a clear roadmap for my career in Medicine. My focus never wavered through many years of personal sacrifices during medical school and training. The end goal was the privilege to practice pediatric medicine and simply help my little patients feel and stay well.

But Medicine today is NOT how I envisioned it to be. Healthcare has become more corporate with assembly-line express services.

In today's typical pediatric offices, well-child visits are allotted an average of 10-20 minutes. It's a near impossible task to be expected to perform all the well-child anticipatory guidance and screenings in an incredibly short amount of time. As many parents know, most of the time is likely spent in the waiting area, checking in, updating address, resolving billing issues or insurance verification, then nurse triage for vision/hearing screening, weight check and vital signs, and filling out more forms and more waiting. Finally, your pediatrician arrives for the remainder of your appointment to perform the exam and review the child's growth, developmental milestones, sleep, nutrition, physical health and exercise, mental health, and behavior concerns. All in a minimal window of time. I don’t know any colleagues who think they have adequate patient time for a comprehensive visit. I don’t know any parents happy with the waiting and the limited face time with their doctor.

But parents and physicians continue to do it every day. I certainly did it for many years. Many of my medical colleagues have surrendered to this unhappy social norm attributing it to the cost of the profession. Most days, we protest over the balancing act, trying to get to the next patient on time while giving the proper time and care to the sick child with unexpected concerns in the next room. We feel your frustration and our moral burn-out from the lack of control in the schedule and work environment. We are happy when you, our patients, are well. We want to be there when you are sick, but we don’t always get to see you when you are. Our schedule is typically overbooked for well encounters, sick concerns being diverted to urgent care for same-day visits, and in-office appointments are limited and rushed. The average 7-minute sick visit doesn’t typically account for the chronicity or severity of the concerning symptoms. Complex issues require significant amount of time to get the details of history and illness. In Medicine, physicians are trained to start with a list of differentials and work out the diagnosis through time and detailed discussion with the patients.

I read a great post once that I am now paraphrasing "Once Upon a Time, there was a profession called Medicine. Today we have an industry called Healthcare. Medicine is about direct patient care and relationships; Healthcare is about managing and coordinating the people in it." I have been managed and trained well in my past to do insurance billings and metric assessments to get reimbursement from third-party payors. There is no joy in that. It was always more meetings, more updates on coding/billing, more administrative work for insurance, more changes in schedule to fit in more patients, and always hurrying from one room to another. Over time, this work environment drives a wedge in the relationships we try to develop.

And our patients feel that they are not heard, not seen, and not cared for well.

So finally, at the fork in the road, I decided to say goodbye to the broken system and forge my own way by joining a new movement of direct primary care.

The new path to direct care is where we said NO to big contracts, insurance reimbursements, 3rd party influence, and payors. We do not want non-clinical persons to set rules and limits on how we spend our time and how to care for patients, especially at the erosion of trust in the doctor-patient relationship and the moral injury of our profession.

This is why I started my own practice, where I am your doctor serving you directly, and nothing should be in between.

It makes sense to me that only once we remove the barriers can we see the simple cure to our current frustrating healthcare delivery system. The solution is TIME. Time spent with patients and their families. Time to listen and hear their history and past experiences. The world moves so fast with bigger attention-grabbing headlines, more adrenaline attraction with online games and entertainment, and rapidly engaging social media platforms. What about our health? Our health needs and deserves attention and care more than ever! So, we need to slow down and MAKE time, as we do with all the important relationships in our lives.

Can you imagine receiving care from your favorite hairstylist in an allotted 5–7 minute appointment or getting a 5-minute car diagnostic test from your mechanic?

You wouldn’t be satisfied if your trusted friend or guiding counselor needed to rush off after 7 minutes of hearing your worries and concerns.

If you value these trust-based relationships and services, you should make time for your primary care doctor and expect the same from your physicians.

And that is my WHY. This is a new journey for me to find my way back to the old-fashioned medicine -where there is joy in giving care and building relationships.

You can visit ZoomiesPediatrics.com to learn more about my practice and the name origin of Zoomies.

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