Health care by monthly membership

In the United States, more than 40 cents of every dollar patients spend on health care goes toward insurance billing and overhead. That means clinicians must see more patients each day just to make ends meet, resulting in longer wait times, shorter appointments and higher costs. Aiming to apply some fresh thinking to an area that sorely needs it, Qliance has developed a new model for health care that works like a health-club membership and excludes insurance from the process. Qliance reminds us of Hello Health for the way it aims to make medical services friendlier and more accessible for everyone. With three clinics in the Seattle area, Qliance gives its members unrestricted access to its clinicians and services for a monthly fee of between USD 44 and USD 129. No long-term contract is required; rather, members simply pay a registration fee of USD 99 and choose from two types of service plans—one with remote hospital coordination, or one with bedside hospital coordination by Qliance clinicians. Services include checkups, vaccinations, pneumonia, minor fractures, routine women’s health exams, and ongoing care for chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension or obesity—the primary and preventive care, in other words, that accounts for 90 percent of the medical issues that drive people to the doctor, according to Qliance. For more serious problems, Qliance recommends that patients have wrap-around insurance plans; the company’s providers also coordinate any necessary outside specialist or hospital care for their patients. The overall result? Shorter wait times, longer appointments (an hour for physicals, for example) and savings of up to 50 percent for patients and employers alike over traditional insurance plans. Open seven days a week, Qliance also reinvests in its clinics, electronic medical records and patient services the 40 cents of each dollar that would have been lost to billing and overhead, it says. Qliance has already received USD 13.5 million in funding, including investments from Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell, and it’s aiming to expand outside Washington as early as next year. One to get in on early? (Related: Doctor 2.0 uses IM & sticks to house calls — A simpler way to make a doctor’s appointment.) Spotted by Susanna Haynie