Yes, just let me know how many you need. They are more than happy to send it out, but they just don't want to send out a whole bunch if they don't know....
The whole idea with the “Patient's Home” is that everyone have access to a family doctor in a timely fashion and that the medical home also interact with other health care professionals—specialists' services, dieticians, social workers, and all those things, to try to streamline and improve patient care.
All our doctors have same-day slots, which means there is a very good chance that if you phone in the morning because you need to be seen, you will be seen by your doctor that day or the next day. In many clinics that's not the case. I'm sure many of you have experienced or have heard from friends and family that they call their doctor because they think they have a urinary tract infection and they get an appointment for a month or two later. That doesn't really do anybody any good, and then, of course, people end up in the emergency room and in other more inappropriate care settings for issues like that.
We've been maintaining that, and it's been working very well. Our patients are very satisfied that, for the most part, they can be seen rather quickly.
One of the other things we wanted to do was to provide alternative care, after-hours care, for our patients, and for patients in the community as well. We decided to have walk-in hours for any patient who wanted to come in—and obviously for our clinic patients. We do our walk-in hours in the evening. We do those from 5 to 9, and we'll be starting up the Saturday walk-in soon. So, for example, if you phoned in and you couldn't get in to see me because my schedule was too busy, you could come to the walk-in at night and still get care within the same day.
We've alerted all the urgent cares and hospitals and ERs that we are open during those hours, and sometimes they redirect patients who don't need emergency room care to come see us. Our hope is to improve care for our patients, to improve care for the patients in the community, and to reduce the impact on other health care services, so that, for example, patients who really do need to be in the emergency room aren't waiting with a bunch of patients who don't really need to be in an emergency room. That has been working very well for us.
Like many clinics, we have a pharmacy and a lab in-house. Our pharmacist collaborates with us. We're often running in and out of her office and her store to ask her questions. Even for patients that she's not even seeing to dispense medications, she'll give us guidance as to what to do.
We're expecting the X-ray clinic to open up next door in the next week or so. They are fully electronic, with X-ray, EKG, and spirometry, and we've set it up so that they actually data-link into our system. So if I order an X-ray, you can go next door and get your X-ray and it pops back into my computer before you come back. If I'm not sure about that X-ray, we have access to the radiologist 24/7, so I can just pick up the phone and hit the speed dial number and the radiologist, for the most part, will be able to look at the film with me, wherever it is they're looking at it on their system, and give us guidance on what the image may represent.
Again, we've expanded to have more services, but we've done so by using electronic and technological items as well as we can. Our clinic is fully electronic, so everything is often just shifting through data ports. Patients will be able to book online appointments soon and go from there.
We tried to follow the model in “The Patient's Medical Home”—and we'll definitely send that out to everybody—and so far, it seems we are working well for the community. Patients have a lot of access to us. Patients can get in quickly to see us. We're working well with lots of other services to streamline things, and that is definitely the way of the future.
Maybe the last thing I'll say is that my business partner and I both teach at the university as well, which is also an important component of this—to teach student learners, whether they be physicians, nurses, or anyone else, and to have them in our clinics. It's good for us. It's good to keep us up to date on things. Students keep you on your toes, for sure. It's also good to expose the students to various health care models.
Most of our new doctors were students we taught. Most of the doctors who started at our clinic had zero patients when they started. Within four or five weeks, all of those doctors were maxed out. They had taken all the patients they could take. For the last doctor we hired, when we advertised, it took just over two weeks for her to max out with over 1,000 patients. It just goes to show you that there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. There are a lot of people who still need doctors.
Thank you.