Many physicians leaving hospital or rent seeker owned medical practices assume the path forward is to replicate what they just left, just more efficiently. They adopt the same cost-cutting mindset, the same automation, the same “throughput” mentality: phone trees, automated assistants, sterile (or even disheveled) waiting rooms, and assembly-line workflows.
But there’s nothing innovative about this. It’s simply the factory-ification of healthcare.
In this model, patients aren’t people, they’re units, widgets with insurance ID cards.
Someone I know, a former executive at a large physician services management company that subsequently filed bankruptcy described their model in which “patient throughput” was the goal, as if care can be optimized the way a factory optimizes output. Physicians become interchangeable operators following “best practices,” which too often becomes a quiet slide into mediocrity. The system reinforces the idea that all care is uniformly excellent, an assertion that defies both logic and reality.
What’s missing is the thing that actually drives success: meaningful experience, especially for patients but also for the other individuals in their orbit (think, for example, referral sources).
Many new healthcare ventures obsess over cutting costs and increasing margins, assuming those are the drivers of success. In reality, those outcomes follow, not lead, when you deliver exceptional, human-centered care with human-centered interaction. Patients don’t choose experiences purely because they are efficient; they choose them because they feel seen, valued, and cared for.
The trajectory mirrors what happens in other industries. A single restaurant succeeds because it delivers great food and a memorable experience. Over time, it expands, standardizes, and scales, turning out “concepts”, the restaurant equivalent of nicer decorated high school cafeterias. Quality slips. The experience becomes inconsistent, impersonal, and forgettable. The very thing that made it successful disappears. Then, it disappears, if not actually, then in the minds of customers who understand that they own their “business” and take it someplace else. No one eating at a restaurant is doing its owner a favor. No one seeking knee surgery is doing the surgeon a favor.
Healthcare is following the same path: centralization, standardization, and the erosion of anything resembling “magic.”
But that also creates opportunity.
For physicians willing to reject the factory model, those who prioritize relationships, attention, and genuine care, there is enormous room to differentiate. The “magic” isn’t gone; it’s just ignored by most as a basis on which to compete.
Our work with both hospital-based and office-based physicians proves that this model works for those with the right mindset.
