“Decades ago, substantial increases in malpractice premiums coincided with new billing and coding requirements that changed the landscape of medicine,” explains Gallivan. “Those new billing and coding requirements made it prohibitive for doctors to stay in solo practice. The amount of time required to act as the administrator for all the billing and coding requirements did not leave enough time in the day to still properly practice medicine.”
Gallivan is a New England-based healthcare policy author, public speaker, and insurance industry expert with a background in pre-medical studies and years of experience as a licensed health insurance broker. His professional journey has given him firsthand insight into the challenges patients, providers, and insurers face and inspired him to become an advocate for a more accessible, affordable, and compassionate healthcare system.
In “Health Care: Compassion in Action,” Gallivan exposes the problems in the modern healthcare framework and offers a practical solution that promises to provide patients with more compassionate and effective care. At the heart of his plan is a return to preventive, patient-first healthcare. But standing in the way, Gallivan says in his book, is a system that “has become absolutely about money instead of the heart.”
“Medicine should always be practiced with the intent of a positive result being the only thing that counts,” says Gallivan. “Towards that end, an ounce of prevention will always be worth a pound of cure. It is time to bring back the day and age of preventive health care.”
AI can enable doctors to reclaim a patient-first approach to healthcare, Gallivan says
“Health Care: Compassion in Action” lays out a plan to restore the global healthcare system to a model in which patients are proactively cared for. Gallivan envisions a future in which patients build relationships with their doctors while they are healthy so that they can receive optimized and personalized care when they are sick. In today’s system, however, Gallivan says that type of care has become inaccessible.
“We are living in a day and age when you go to your primary care doctor two times a year for 15 minutes at each visit over 365 days,” Gallivan says. “If you are sick, then you are put in the care of a nurse practitioner who, despite being possibly the most intelligent and altruistic person on the planet, has never been educated in medicine at a medical school. Then, when you are so sick that your health is severely affected, you finally meet your specialist.”
The first step to fixing the system, Gallivan says, is using artificial intelligence for medical insurance billing and coding. Automating those processes with AI-powered platforms would allow doctors to escape group practices, which Gallivan says can quickly cause doctors to “lose their incentive to remain altruistic,” and reclaim the ability to perform in solo practices.
“Artificial intelligence will streamline all patient care models individually, reducing fraud and waste and resulting in a massive reduction in health care costs and possible elimination or drastic decrease of medical underwriting divisions,” Gallivan says. “This simple but amazing feat frees doctors to rid themselves of being part of a group and become independent contractors again, bringing back the day and age when you knew your doctors well in advance of when you needed them.”
Education reform is needed to address the current physician shortage, Gallivan says
“Health Care: Compassion in Action” explains how AI-powered healthcare can benefit both patients by empowering customizable individual care models and providers by reducing waste and costs. But to fully realize the benefits of AI, Gallivan says, the system needs to address today’s physician gap.
“For this plan to work, we must have enough doctors and nurses to fill every area of the country,” Gallivan says. “Education reform will bring true equality.”
The education reform component of Gallivan’s plan gives students the opportunity to take part in a program during middle school that provides age-appropriate courses such as anatomy and physiology, much like kids who currently take language classes. Participants will receive relevant education that will culminate in their ability to attend college and pursue medical degrees.
“The intent would be to create a vocational approach to health care education with a high likelihood of success,” Gallivan says. “The only difference is that these educational environments will be foundational to postgraduate students.”
The plan for more accessible medical education Gallivan’s book lays out would create a reliable source for medical professionals, which in turn would create an environment in which patient-centered care could thrive again. Gallivan says the shift would result in a flood of doctors and nurses pouring into every region to support the renaissance of a preventive care model of health.
“We need to return to the simple notion of the patient-doctor relationship being the most important facet of what the health care field is based on for all people in the future,” Gallivan says. “The new health care concept proposed in my book will re-instill passion and purpose in being a health care professional again throughout the entire industry.”
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