One of the things we do constantly is talk to doctor’s offices and try to get them to list their prices online. Back in the winter of 2009-2010, I personally knocked on over 2,500 physician office doors in New York City to try to get them to sign up for a crazy idea I called FairCare. I walked over 500 miles, spent four months, gave lots of small bribes of Starbucks cards, hosted about a dozen lunches, and spent a great deal of money.  I also gathered great material for a book my working title for is “Erin Brokovich Does Medical Marketing.”  It is far more difficult for a bald, pudgy middle-aged dude selling price transparency to get in to see the doctor than a handsome young man or woman with free drugs.  It’s okay, I’m not bitter, and eventually, miraculously, I got 100 doctors or office managers to say yes to a free listing.  Taking this as encouragement (although in retrospect, I should not have), I hired and inspired my friends Jacek Zagorski, Jeremey Senn, Adam Whittaker, Mike Schwartz, and Mike Pence to build the FairCareMD site.  It launched in June of 2010 and we waited for the world to notice.  You see, we had convinced ourselves that all we needed to do was build the better mousetrap and that the world would say, “Gee Whiz! Let’s get that!”  Well, we were wrong and we needed to keep selling the idea to make it grow – both to Doctors AND Patients.

Knowing that the door-to-door sales method was far too expensive, we next tried email and fax to spread the word but this was pretty unsuccessful and mostly just annoyed people.  Meanwhile, since day 1 we had always allowed people to request a price and we would find them a few fairly priced places to go.  This was designed to be a truly valuable free service/ soft sales tactic.  We would call medical offices with a patient request for specific services for a fair price and see if they would do it.  A typical request from a patient would say something like “I want a Chest CT Scan for $250″ or “I want colonoscopies for my wife and I for less than $3,200 apiece” and we would call to see if we could fill them.  A side benefit is that this process also introduced a medical office to FairCareMD and potentially would lead to new listings.  If we could find a fairly priced office, it worked well and occasionally one good connection would lead to a new listing… but first we had to find the fairly priced office.

Here is how that would go back in 2010:
Colonoscopies: Our then Chief Patient Advocate Sunnie Southern called every endoscopy center in Montana to no avail. After speaking with the client, she learned that they had a daughter in Boston, so they flew to Boston, paid $1600 total for a 75% savings, and got to visit their girl.  Happy ending, but three days of work to get that and no signups.  Not economical.

CT Scan: Our Chief Marketing Officer, Simon Sikorski, MD called 17 centers for a CT Scan and found 2 reasonable prices in the $350 range.  Total time, about 4 hours and no signups.  Still not very economical.

So after making thousands of calls, in 2012 we gave up on phone-based sales of listings and made the site free for doctors to sign up. This increased signups and cost nothing. Meanwhile, Sunnie, Simon and I went on to do other really cool things like Innov8forhealth, Empowered Doctors, and MedStartr.com, leaving FairCareMD up as an automated awesome price negotiating system that still helps thousands of people every month. FairCareMD is currently only supported by advertising and my great friend and co-founder, Jacek Zagorski who is donating a few virtual machines for our system. Jeremy Senn and Mike Pence still throw a few programming hours in per month, but mostly the site is on autopilot, and this actually works for the doctors who are in the system or who sign themselves up. Traffic goes up every month and we help patients all the time.

So we still get requests like the one above, but we have found the reactions of Medical Offices have changed significantly. We got two this week so far, one from a blogger who talked about it here.  But here is the thing: We filled her request with one call. We are waiting for the doctor to decide if he wants his free listing, but I am pretty sure he will. It’s a no-brainer to doctors who are fairly-priced already.

This represents a serious change.  I don’t know if it was the Time Magazine cover story, the continued erosion of insurance payments for Doctors, the fact that more of us than ever are paying out of pocket for care, or the new legislation that requires doctors to publish their prices online, but we believe the Time is Now and it is getting very interesting in this space.  So make a request if you need care for a fair price or see if we already have a fairly priced doctor in your area.  If you have time and want to learn our methods, we are looking for sales people again, so call (954) 324 7227 and let’s talk if you are passionate about this idea.

Thanks to all who have contributed, stuck with us, and are reading this post.  It has been a long haul, but I think we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

by Regina Holliday (www.twitter.com/ReginaHolliday)

Hey Folks,

What an incredible effect the version 3 release of FairCareMD called FairCare EveryWhere has had on FairCare. The community has been growing faster and stronger than ever, we have new people joining the movement and doctors are claiming their profiles and getting set up faster than ever. Thank you for your support as we transitioned to new servers and our new appointment requester model. You can still ask for a price, but now we enabled appointment requests too.

The most amazing thing is happening.  Patients are asking doctors and hospital for appointments and fair prices all over America on our site 7 times more often than before.  People want choice and transparency and Version 3 brings it.  Over the next few weeks as we roll out more specialties all over the country please be welcome to make a request from a specific doctor and we will make it happen or give you other options.

Thank you for being part of FairCareMD, driving medical access and price transparency in America.  We are making prices more transparent and creating the largest network of healthcare providers willing to work with patients directly for fair fees anywhere.

Best Regards,

Alex B. Fair

p.s. nice growth pattern, right?

Traffic on FairCareMD increases exponentially Summer 2012

(Just in case you were unaware, FairCareMD is owned only by the founders, not some big company or investor group, so the pockets are not deep.)

So we did what any self respecting entrepreneurs would do, we put the project on Kickstarter, or we tried to at least. They didn’t want it because they do not accept healthcare projects. So we set up our own crowdfunding site called MedStartr.com and put FairCareMD on it. Check out the project, embedded below.

As you can see, very few people have funded the project. So I can only conclude that the world does not want or need price transparency for healthcare. Sure, Politicians, news anchors and the papers talk about it a great deal, but when you get right down to it, people have insurance or they don’t get care. As a result, FairCareMD appears to have no market to make for main stream medicine. The doctors are afraid of this unknown territory. The patients think “what is wrong with the doctor to be on FairCareMD?” At the end of the day it has been an interesting experiment and I have learned a great deal. One key fact I have learned is that entrepreneurs should test market with paid versions, not free ones, to get real reactions. This is one of the many aspects of Crowd funding that makes perfect sense now – get people to vote with their wallets to validate your idea, not just their mouths.

Thank you for reading and for your support.  The blog will continue but we will likely pack up the FairCareMD main site or spin it down to one server this week if we don’t see some traction on our the above project or obtain outside investment. If you have an interest, we are open to suggestions. Just call (954) FAIR-CARE.

The World’s Greatest Term Sheet

I have the distinct pleasure of owning and advising many startups that have received “Terms Sheets” from would be investors.  Some are good, some are bad, and then there are some have hidden catches that make you lose millions.  It all depends on how badly the investor wants your stock or product.  I’ll be the first to admit that not every company I have created was a home run on the first pitch, usually there are long innings and stretches you are not sure you will survive and a single or double is what keeps you in the game.  But by far the best term sheet you will ever get is a Bill of Sale.

This is why Crowdfunding intrigued me at first.  Through crowdfunding, not only do companies gain customers and drive some revenue, but it also engages a conversation around the product, drives awareness, and funds the next version.  I initially reviewed Kickstarter, IndieGogo, Perti Dish and a few other crowdfunding sites to list FairCareMD on.  The problem I sought to solve was that while FairCareMD has been visited by one in 1,000 American, it has failed to get on the radar for the other 999.  Similarly, I needed a way to help my 400,000 searches find more doctors.  We had already developed version 3, but to buy enough servers and man the phones as needed, a small capital raise seemed like a good idea.  I had previously gone to Angels and VCs and gotten a great deal of “talk to us when you have more success” or “sorry, we just don’t know your sector well enough.” The bottom line, no one really wants to take a chance on a product or company until it is obviously successful.  This is smart and right, otherwise their investment portfolios would depreciate rapidly.  Not every company is facebook or Amazon.  So I understand the situation, but I wasted a tremendous amount of time and neglected other key aspects of what I needed to do.

So in a small startup you have three choices of what to do with your far too limited time:

1. Raise Capital
2. Make Sales
3. Make Product and Ship!

One of these is not revenue generating.  All three are important but without # 2 the rest are irrelevant.

These three activities are also why CrowdFunding is so perfect for healthcare startups.  The big companies that control most of the money in the healthcare system are so far removed from innovation that they can’t do it on their own very well.  Aetna alone bought 1.5 Billion dollars worth of startups last year, for example.

Why can’t big companies innovate?

Several reasons: They are too big to “experiment” beyond a certain level.  Second, it isn’t in their DNA.  They may have an innovation division, but after a while even the most entrepreneurial leaders lose their innovator mojo.  I know, it happened to me and I had to relearn entrepreneurship.  Your brain gets stuck in a “thinking inside the box” mode and you need to drill out the hinges to escape, or do like my friend Jack did and make with the tin snips.  Finally, innovation takes faith and it is hard to really believe in change if your business is not built on it.  This is also why post-acquisition failures are common too.  Money can’t but that kind of faith.

On the other hand, if you have a great idea and can engage with the public on it, then Money Can Be Invested on Faith and this makes all the difference.  That is why we created MedStartr, to help bridge the gap between idea and commercial success.  To help innovators get the best possible term sheets – Bills of Sale.  Our partner program also enables large companies to back an idea and super-enable the entrepreneur to Fund Raise, Sell, and Ship all in one click after an hour or two of effort.  The partner wins too since they buy access to the technology only on a successful crowdfund.  For more information email The MedStartr Partner Program.

Give me a bill of sale any day over a term sheet.  Give me enough of them and I never need to raise capital and can keep the vision going on the most important terms – those of my customers.

FairCareMD on MedStartr

You will now find the FairCareMD project on MedStartr.  If you are a doctor or hospital or any allied health professionals and want more patients ready to pay a fair price for your work, we have several levels of rewards at a discount designed just for you.

If you are a Patient and need help saving 10-75% off your care using our system, we have an offer for you.

If you are a Payor and would like to try to determine how you could Pay less by letting patients Shop, we have an offer for you as well!

And if enough people support the project we will spin up  few more servers and really get this site jumping.  We are helping thousands per month, but we could be helping millions get great care for fair prices.  If the crowd wants it, it will be done.

MPADS.com – a check in kiosk for your physician’s office that tiers to a 3rd wave patient portal designed from the ground up for the ePatient who is active, engaged, and wants to communicate between visits.  We partnered with one of the first approved ACOs to create a system that will keep patients healthier not just at the office visit, but between visits too!

Doctors First Association – an online marketplace for everything you need to run your medical or dental office at a considerable discount.  Visit Dr1st.org to shop tens of thousands of products and specials every day.

MedStartr - Crowdfunding for healthcare.  Kickstarter doesn’t want medical innovations, so we had to roll our own.  Launching on the 4th of July to show our belief that this healthcare revolution is for the people and by the people.  Guess what is one of the first projects there?  Yup, you guessed it, FairCareMD!  Sign up to be informed here.

FairCareMD has a 3rd Version rolling out for every doctor in the USA!  You also can now do appointment requests! We also have moved to the freemium model which means it is free for most and premium services are available.  We think it is awesome and hope you do too!  More on this later.

Our Healthcare Innovation Meetup group has topped 1,880 members and run an event every month.  Here is one of the best so far, where we showed off MedStartr and had a bunch of the folks from our first wave of projects strutting their stuff!

Here is the full event video.  Feel free to skip to 1:32 where I go on

Thank you for being members of the FairCareMD community and to my partners at Convergent, FairCare, Health 2.0 NYC, and MedStartr.  You guys and girls ROCK!  If Summer is anything like this Spring has been, it will be Hot Hot Hot!

I loved that company and the clothes they made.  More specifically, my wife loved the clothes and she looks great in them to this day.  The people on my team were world class and the real reason I stayed so long.  Bo, Daniel, Chiney, Madaline, Johnny and over a hundred others made me believe in the American Dream in ways that I never truly understood until I saw them go for that brass ring and get it day after day.

Now, almost 4 years exactly after I gave up on convincing that CEO, his company has declared bankruptcy.  His sacred cows were turned into hamburger by the debt holders.  It is a sad day in my personal history and I tell this story not to crow, but to make a statement about self-disruption and innovation.  Any company can make this mistake.  Most famously, IBM turned down the opportunity to buy Xerox in the 50s, Digital in the 60s, and even thought the personal computer was a waste of time for several years, letting little upstart Apple own the market into the early 80s.  My old company did the same thing, ignoring the upstarts and the change that was inevitable while new companies came in and had a field day.  Even the best companies can make mistakes and the best companies can rebound as well.  IBM did a few years later when they entered and came to dominate the PC market by 1984.  I wish my old company luck and from what I hear, they finally got the memo – from their bankers.  For the rest of us the message is clear – innovate or risk the meat grinder that comes with a loss of control.

This applies equally to medical practices.  Every day I talk to Physicians that are struggling to make payroll or are considering accepting that offer from the hospital’s practice acquisition team or other consolidation play.  Doctors are working harder all the time for less pay and more administrative headaches and paperwork.  EMRs are great, but they are not really labor savers for doctors and the often disrupt the clinical exam with data entry.  The offers from IDNs and health systems are attractive but we all know where that road leads and giving up control of one’s practice is not high on the list for most doctors.  So what is a small practice to do?

Well, of course I would say “Innovate!”  Innovate in your practice.  Whether this means moving to electronic records, installing a Kiosk for check in, adding a patient portal, or moving to a membership model, there are myriad ways to get paid better and faster with less tedious administrative work than ever.  You also can add services that make sense or focus on your “Centers of Excellence” that offer outstanding services for reasonable fees.  Of course, increasing your number of patients that pay you Directly and Fairly through FairCareMD is never a bad thing either.  Automation for your practice has arrived, addressing marketing, contracting, communications, making copies, collecting payments and all the non-medical work of running a practice – leaving the actual patient care experience intact or improved.  It is a shiny brand new day for your practice if you want it to be.

So take a lesson from my former life in women’s clothing, Innovate or Give Up Control.

And to all my great staff from those days, you have my number.

Coupon good for one EKG by board certified Physicians for $100, Insurance accepted

NBC Nightly News did a segment on how Groupon and Living Social have saved consumers over half a billion dollars on medical and dental care already.  One physician stated he got over 1,300 new patients in 2 days.  Very impressive numbers.  We have only helped a few hundred thousand folks here so far but this is real medical care, not just teeth whitenings and spa days.  Nonetheless, the data are compelling.  When patients and doctors connect on “Deals” on our site we help consumers (aka patients) save up to 75%, about half on some things like colonoscopies, and about 37% on average.  Doctors get paid better and faster too.  

Thank You MSNBC!

While I do love a good coupon, there are three problems with coupons for healthcare (and how we deal with the issue here on FairCareMD):

1. Timing: medical needs are inconveniently unpredictable.  Coupons expire and “Group Coupons” would not work for something like migraine sufferers sincepeople in severe pain aren’t waiting for a coupon.   At FairCareMD we have deals everyday or make your own.Have a migraine now, see Dr. Audrey Halpern, world class headache specialist!

2. Respect: Doctors don’t want to be on coupons.  It is a long way to go from being worshiped at the temple to being a Daily Deal with your picture on a coupon.  Further complicating matters, there are real and implied penalties for going too low with pricing in public that could include significant fines and even losing your license if you charge less than the rate Medicare allows.  While this is easily mitigated with a solution like FairCareMD, most doctors are reluctant.  Dentists, yes, Physicians, no.

3.  Quality is King: My grandpa used to say, “don’t get a cheap Lawyer, Accountant, or Doctor” and he was right in most cases.  What he didn’t appreciate was the way medical pricing works.  The same doctor that charges $250 for an office visit is being negotiated down to $37 for that same visit by gigantic insurance companies.  Go ahead, ask your doctor, 95% have this problem.  Smart ones are getting listed on FairCareMD and firing the worst insurance companies, trading low paying contracts for direct paying patients who pay fairly and directly.  But I digress, quality is the topic.  Tis is why we incorporate every quality metric we can find into Physician’s profile.

4. Stark Laws: There are laws (Stark and Anti-Kickback laws) that prevent Physicians from paying for referrals.  Originally created to prevent paid referral networks from flourishing, these laws are widely circumvented by hospital networks and insurance companies.  Typical of medicine, the letter of the law is followed but the spirit is lost in translation.  The rates that Groupon charges, upwards of 25% and as high as 50% of the fee, if used for real medicine, would be illegal.  This is why FairCareMD is freemium – free for doctors in most cases.

Despite my reservations, I do find it very gratifying to see couponing working in healthcare, even if it is currently largely for dental and cosmetic work.  It bodes well for patients and doctors in the near future.

Thank you to the hundreds of doctors who list their services on FairCareMD. Great doctors willing to charge a fair price when people go directly.  Doctors like Marina Gafanovich MD and Lisa Eng DO who are really leading the way.

We helped a couple from Montana that just wanted to check to see if they had colon cancer. They have insurance, but their deductibles are so high that they wind up paying for most of their care directly. They asked us to find them a fair price for the screenings. We tried and tried, but we could not find a price less than $3,300 within a hundred miles when the national average price paid for the service is about $2,300. Meanwhile, on FairCareMD the average price for the same service is $1,209, or 46% less than the national average. Sunnie called the couple to say, “sorry, we can’t help you” but after a short talk, she learned that the couple was visiting the East Coast soon. With a stronger network back East we helped the couple get what they want for well below average in the city they were visiting, saving them over $3,000!

Which leads me to the next question:

Is it fair that doctors don’t feel safe sharing reasonable fees with the public?

No doctor we have spoken to likes the lack of pricing transparency, but many don’t feel they have any choice. Warm, caring, wonderful practices like the one that helped our couple from Montana fear that insurance carriers will take advantage of low publicly published pricing to lower their rates.  Worse yet, they fear that they will be charged with Medicare fraud just for publishing a fair price online.  This is exactly why we designed our pricing system the way we did – with a list price that not bad, but not as low as possible.  What you don’t see is that behind the scenes there is a lower price that, if you propose it, the system will automatically accept.  While not everyone uses this price masking feature of our system, it is there to ease providers into the hot tub of price transperncy that is FairCareMD.

For the providers who have been on FairCareMD long enough to know that it is not dangerous (we have had no issues to date with the basis of this fear) you can find great deals for real care here too.  Many are what you would call a “Special” so that they are not comparable to a typical service.  This is a second tactic for dealing with this concern. Fact is that deals made on FairCareMD are never comparable to those paid for by insurance or the government.  This is because they are all for care paid for at the time of service without a lengthy, laborious collection process.  This is “substantively different” from what your insurance company pays for.  Speaking of which…

Is its fair that up to about 35% of your insurance premium has nothing to do with your medical care?

Did you really want to pay for insurance company marketing, administration, network management, “care management”, contracting, executive compensation, and up to 14% profit?  Does any of that have anything to do with keeping or getting you healthy?  The inefficient marketplace and system is a huge burden on those paying for insurance.  In our experience we cut about 30% of the fat out of the system just by enabling direct contracting for care.

Much about how medicine works today is unfair.  We are bringing fairness to medical pricing.  We would love it if you joined us in this effort..  You can Register as a patient, Sign up as a provider, or Join us as a Market Maker to bring FairCareMD to your town and make your own network.  We need all of you to make this work, so sign up today!

Clay Shirky Keynote – Health 2.0 SF 2008 from Health 2.0 on Vimeo.

I wish I watched this video before I started FairCareMD.  As it is, I stumbled upon it last night while looking for something else.  Clay talks about the power of the people, in aggregate, to lead change.  Here he addresses this effect in healthcare and prophesizes changes that we see beginning to reshape healthcare.  If you don’t have 19 minutes to watch the video, the best parts are in his examples.  He talks of a group of cancer patients that wanted to interview an oncologist for inclusion in their service.  He speaks of a orthopedics medical device manufacturer that tried to address a design problem by covering it up and “retraining” doctors.  One got annoyed, posted his thoughts, and a few weeks later everyone knew the device had a real problem and a class action suit was filled.  He talks about the Catholic church’s historical success in covering up pedophile priests and why that method no longer works.  And then he talks about healthcare institutions that resist the changes that are coming from Health 2.0 organizations and ePatients that would have them change for the better.

Most importantly, he predicts that the people will lead the physicians, hospitals, insurance companies, and even our government into the new era of healthcare.  2010 saw the highest insurance cost increases in a decade and 2011 looks like it will follow suit.  More people are figuring out that the jig is up for insurance and coming here and doing other things like setting up clinics on their campuses.  A great story about WeCare TLC was published in Inc Magazine the other day.  A manufacturing company, in response to the high cost of healthcare, opened an on site clinic and saved over half.  Even better, their employees were healthier and there were no “surprises” like heart attacks and strokes in 2010, typically the result of non-care, what usually happens when patient responsibility costs go up.

We at FairCareMD have embraced this concept, allowing the patients to lead.  We already let patients request fair prices from their doctors, but our next step takes it further and automates the process.  Just last night a patient called into our help line and said, in effect ‘Why am I paying $5,700 for an ACL surgery when I can get it for $3,200 on FairCare – and I have insurance!’  Needless to say, she is questioning the wisdom of insurance and going direct now.  Later today we will call all the best orthopedic surgeons in her area and ask what they will charge for a patient going direct.  At least one will be happy to provide a fair price because he or she gets paid better directly than insurance companies will pay for the same exact procedure.  FairCareMD offers this as a free service to get the message out.

Thanks Clay for the explanation of why what we are doing is working!  Your talk presaged the ePatient and #OccupyHealthcare movements.  The question is, when will that tipping point be achieved and when will the institutions that are failing stop failing to notice that the world has moved on.

In the film starring Denzel Washington, John Q, holds a hospital hostage to save his son's life and while this is an inspirational story with an improbable happy ending, one can only wonder how many lives would have been lost in real life were this to happen.

The Occupy Wall Street movement that has dominated news channels and social media for the past 5 days is only one guillotine short of a revolution, but what I find most disturbing is that it is essentially an angry group of citizens with no clear agenda. Anger and Anarchy are destructive, what is needed here is creative disruption, not just reactive disruption.

The broken healthcare system also makes many of us frustrated and angry and indeed there is some talk of an OccupyHealthcare movement, but there is a problem with such a disruption in healthcare.  Healthcare is Too Important to Fail.  We are talking about human lives and while I think that there are major changes that would be addressed in the wake of radical action, anything that disturbs the care delivery system will have an immediate impact on lives, and that is not acceptable.

Until there is a clear plan, a set of directives, an Occupy Healthcare movement must avoid care disruption.  I know it is trite and overused, but let’s start by taking a line from the Hippocratic oath, primum non nocere or ‘First, do no harm.’

So this means no camp outs, no boycotts, no sit ins, and certainly no Dog Day Afternoon/ John Q inspired moments.

There would appear to be some hope though.  Healthcare Reform (PPACA) has many provisions that are intended to level the playing field.  Unfortunately though, our fractured and misaligned industry players have been true to form.  Insurance companies are playing all the angles, earning record profits and raising premiums while the actual utilization and cost metrics decline.  Hospitals are gobbling up small practices at a frightening rate in anticipation of renewed pricing pressure with a circle the wagons (and capture the referral base) mentality, as usual.  Meanwhile, the majority of Physicians have largely kept their heads down and just kept doing what they have been doing for the past 30 years.  For example, only 30 -35% of Physicians have taken advantage of the huge incentives to implement EMRs, one solution that could vastly reduce the cost of care.  Patients, on the other hand offer a real glimmer of hope.  More are self educating than ever and millions are getting involved, adopting self-care proactive strategies, eating better, and even shopping for care.  The e-patient movement provides hope for us all because where the patients go, the industry will need to follow.

Another reason to hope are startups like ours, Practice Fusion, DrChrono, Register Patient, Your Nurse is On, HealthcareBlueBook, and a thousand others that are innovating to solve the myriad problems in healthcare, trying to beat the clock before incentives, time, and the money completely runs out.

To take the Electronic Medical Record example again, I know I used to spend about $50,000 a month running the IT for 150 doctor’s offices and two large medical billing companies.  Now, several free EMRs are available that improve medical office efficiency and require only an iPad to run.  Now that is revolutionary!  Same thing with Register Patient, a cloud based solution that streamlined the data entry and appointment making process for doctors and patients.  Communication tools like Talk About Health let patients learn from each other and expert providers, saving everyone time and money in appointments are leveling the playing field.  And, of course, FairCare taking the 30% that insurance companies waste and giving it back to doctors and patients like some sort of Keynsian Robin Hood, is making a real difference.  Want to cut the cost of care by 30% or even 50%, this is imminently doable.  I know because we do it every day here.

So here is my OccupyHealthcare Manifesto:

Doctors and Patients, if you are sick of how the system works, do something about it.  Don’t wait for failure, prepare for the inevitable and get ahead of the wave.

Doctors, Practice Administrators, and Hospital Executives:  Embrace innovation that makes care more affordable and improves your bottom line.  You can activate a free account on any of the above services, reduce your cost of doing business, reduce overhead, and pass the savings on to the patient.  Medicare will be bankrupt soon, so this is a survival tactic as well.

Patients:  Utilize these automated systems and favor the doctors who also do.  Examples: Macarthur OBGYN, Howard Luks, Qliance, One Medical, Care Practice, ExclusiveMD, or any of the doctors on FairCareMD are these innovators, so seek them out.  (If you know or are one, please use our recommend a doc feature and we will invite her or him for a free account.)  Also, use the new systems and websites to make care more efficient and self educate as much as possible.  Don’t know where to start? Just watch this video of ePatient Dave or read a few posts by Regina Holliday.  We are all in this together, so meet your doctor half way and make the job easier.  For example, if you are overweight, try to reduce your risk of diabetes or heart attack by seriously dieting.  Most importantly, take responsibility and stop thinking someone else will pay for your health care.  That is unfair thinking and not realistic.  Someone always pays.  How much is paid depends on you, to a large extent.

Medicine is too important to allow to descend into anarchy or walled communities of care where only the rich can afford to be well.  This boils down to…

The first two tenets of #Occupy Healthcare:

1. Do No Harm, do not disrupt the delivery system

2.  We all must Embrace Innovation that Redhttp://blog.faircaremd.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1342&action=edit&message=1uces the Cost of Delivering or Receiving Care

The rest us up to you.

The Innovators will keep on innovating.

The ePatients will keep on getting involved in their care decisions and making the Physican’s job faster and easier.

Proactive providers and institutions will continue to step up and reduce the cost of care.

Some proactive insurance companies will continue to embrace methods that not only make investors happy, but also make people healthy (no, they are not mutually exclusive goals.)

So what will you do to Occupy Healthcare?

Will you evaluate a new system?

Will you open a Surgical Center?

Will you learn everything there is to know about your problem?

Will you request an online appointment?

Will you offer care for a fair fee?

Will you start a wellness program in your club, work, or family?

What will you do?

If we will all to a little, we will create a radical change that will Save Healthcare, rather than just Occupy it.

Thank you for reading and your support.

Comments are welcome here or through twitter at @FairCareMD or follow Hashtag #OccupyHealthcare.