What Is Concierge Healthcare?

Russ Alan Prince
, ContributorI write about the creation and management of exceptional wealth.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

With healthcare institutions throughout the world increasingly stressed, the wealthy are regularly not inclined to rely on these public systems – at least not in the ways the masses rely on them. Instead, the wealthy are more and more able and likely to pay for a higher if not always exceptional standard of care. The term for this is concierge healthcare.

There are four basis models of concierge healthcare. The most basic version is "travel medical assistance." An example of this is the number you call on the back of your American Express Black card connecting you to an operator to help with aeromedical evacuations and access to a database of foreign physicians and hospitals. “Private health advisories” – another version – adds on services such as comprehensive individualized physical exams, electronic medical records, access to second opinions and helps with complex disease management. A third variation is the “private physician practice.” This is essentially a doctor on an annual retainer to provide rapid call backs and a higher level of personal interaction.

The most comprehensive form of concierge healthcare is referred to as the “total care platform.” It’s the Rolls Royce model of medical care that includes all the services already noted plus a number of additional ones such as custom medical contingency plans and calendared longevity plans. The most compelling and personally tangible additional service these concierge healthcare providers deliver is immediate routine and emergency telediagnosis and treatment.

Daniel Carlin M.D., founder and President of WorldClinic, is a pioneer in the field of “total care” medicine. He’s credited with creating the development of a continuous communication base care model that includes the patient, their medical records, the monitoring of their chronic problems, formal calendared health planning and immediate telediagnosis and treatment. The enabling technology that ties it all together has been the client’s own Smart Phone. “By providing customized prescription medical kits with 24/7 phone and video access to a team of physicians who have a comprehensive understanding of the patient’s medical situation, we’re able to deliver emergency care that has been proven to save lives time and again,” explains Dr. Carlin, “It’s the combination of the efforts of a lot of people on both sides of the phone, supported by a sophisticated service model that makes this form of telemedicine so powerful.”

An emerging part of Carlin’s model is the use of simple, unobtrusive monitors that can be used to track a patient’s vital signs and the behaviors that can improve his or her health. With the Smart Phone acting as the bridge, the information generated by these devices is tracked by WorldClinic physicians who can then respond clinically to the patients’ progress, often prescribing new therapies and stopping ineffective ones. Says Dr. Carlin, “Right now, inside WorldClinic, we are running a small Smart Phone-based ‘virtual’ clinic for our patients with hypertension and cardiac arrhythmias. The data these monitors generate is far beyond what we would get in an office-based practice. Not surprisingly, our clinical decisions are better, but most importantly, we see the immediate effect of our management decisions. This is a big deal. In the very near future, we’ll be able to, in real time, monitor and manage a patient’s health status to maximal effect. The benefit to the patient will be measured not in years, but in decades of meaningful life.”