mahiwaga

Hilariously, I totally foresaw the Apple Watch back in 2006.

Not that that foresight did me any good.

I remember reading about Jay Parkinson, M.D. back in 2007 and it did seem like a perfect convergence of popular technology and medicine.

I was skeptical it would scale, but he was working at it for a while and it seemed like it was going well.

But Dr. Parkinson predicts that “Uber for doctor house calls” is not sustainable once the VC money runs out.

I do wonder if this would work better if physicians didn’t have onerous student debts to finance.

And I certainly don’t make $800 a day working in a clinic even seeing 20-30 patients a day, but I also don’t have to work more than eight hours a day or walk around all of Brooklyn and I don’t have to worry about buying my own supplies or about my vaccines losing their efficacy while sitting in a cooler full of melting ice.

Dr. Parkinson also touches upon the health care cost crisis in the U.S. and the oncoming primary care shortage.

While mid-level practitioners will probably fill the gap, I do still worry that our specialist-centric system is doomed to ever spiralling costs.

As he points out, countries like the U.K. and Canada have more generalists than specialists, and this no doubt helps keep costs down. They don’t have to worry about maximizing procedural volume. Not everyone needs a cath or a scope, but this is a lot of what our tax dollars and insurance premiums are paying for.