Carena creates corporate concierge health service

Here's another way to healthier employees. You give them a phone number. They call when someone in the house is sick. A nurse can walk a patient through first aid, make sure they get to an emergency room, or have a doctor come visit. It's all done by the same firm which runs the workplace clinic. It's all in the corporate family. When the doctor makes a house call the doctor takes his time. He just sees a few patients each day. He comes to your door, with a black bag and a Wyse terminal. He (or she) collects a full medical history, prescribing when necessary, building a relationship, uploading the EMR back with a Verizon AirCard. This is Carena, which has launched a slow nationwide roll-out of services from the Pacific Northwest. They have contracts with Microsoft and Costco. So far their Web site lists 13 physicians on call. These are early days. It's yet another effort to use technology in fixing what a growing number of academics are calling a broken health system. Mike Viles is the vice president- technology and says there are two technology keys. First is the system used by the nurse when answering the phone. Second is the terminal brought in by the doctor. Both make the impersonal personal. "We report as much data as we can possibly collect about the service we provide back to our customers. From that we respond to the needs of our customers." The data has two purposes. It helps the employer maintain wellness, increase retention, and keep costs down over the long term. It also creates a more intimate relationship between the patient, their family, and any subsequent Carena physician who may visit.

"Because we're in urgent care we don't have a lot of repeat patients. We have a lot of repeat families. If we see one individual in a family we often see another. We spend as much time as necessary, not just to educate on the urgent concern but what's going on in general."

And this last is important. An intimate doctor-patient relationship has a better chance of changing lifestyles than the quick conversations you might have in a doctor's office.

Wiles offers this pitch for doctors.

"It's not a pretty world for family care physicians. Patient interaction is just 7-12 minutes. They're seeing 20-30 a day.

"Our doctors spend about an hour with each patient, and they see 2-5 per day. They have a greater opportunity to provide care in that. In terms of a lifestyle, it's a pretty easy pitch especially when the pay is as good as in a clinic."

In a way it's a return to the 19th century, when factories maintained their own clinics, before the advent of insurance and technology de-personalized everything.

Now technology is re-personalizing everything, and helping to bring the house call back as a corporate perk.