Why would people who have all their other affairs in order — legal, financial, even groundskeepers — settle for a 15-minute slot?”
It’s a fair question — but the new approach does not sit so well with veteran practitioners like Dr. Henry Jones
III, one of Silicon Valley’s original concierge doctors at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation’s Encina Practice.
Although Private Medical provides its patients with doctors’ cellphone numbers
and same-day appointments, like more conventional concierge practices do, Dr. Shlain does not like the term “concierge care.”
“When I’m at a country club or a party and people ask me what I do, I say I’m an asset manager,” Dr. Shlain explained.
In fact, before founding Private Medical, Dr. Shlain, 50, worked as the on-call doctor at the Mandarin Oriental hotel
here, an experience he said taught him about how to provide five-star service as well as good medical care.
A third-generation doctor from Boston, Dr. Jones offers a version of concierge medicine
that is a way of providing more personalized service — the way doctors did when he graduated from medical school more than four decades ago — rather than delivering a different standard of care.
Indeed, as many Americans struggle to pay for health care — or even, with the future of the Affordable Care Act in question on Capitol Hill, face a
loss of coverage — this corner of what some doctors call the medical-industrial complex is booming: boutique doctors and high-end hospital wards.
“You have no idea how much money there is here,” said Dr. Harlan Matles, who specializes in internal medicine
and joined MD Squared after working at Stanford, where he treated 20 to 25 patients a day and barely had time to talk to them.