What if I a heart patient wanted to take a stress test every day, or an EKG? A little too much, you say. Don't they require you to either have something going on -- something bad -- or to wait a given period of time for the check up?
Yes, they do. Insurance requires it.
What if you didn't even have heart problem, but just wanted to see how exercising affected your heart. Wouldn't it be great to just drive over to the doctor's office, plug in the machine, and monitor how exercise was affecting you?
Maybe a guy wants to know how alcohol affect his heart. So, he monitors the stress test and EKG results for three months, then quits drinking, and maintains the same diet and exercise routine for another six months.
My thought is, once the doctor has purchased the equipment, the expense of using it over and over shouldn't be prohibitive to using it often. Just like with a dishwasher, of course it is going to break down someday, but you don't tell the children they can use it only every other day.
I say, as long as the patient is willing to pay for the technician's time, and do so without expecting insurance to kick in, he should be allowed to. That's probably already the case. It's just that it is not affordable.
It should be. I can't see why it shouldn't.
The technicians could monitor more than one person doing a stress test at a time, cutting the cost of staffing. The EKG? They can be quick enough, that the expense of personnel should not be too great. Call me crazy, but I wonder if we couldn't even allow the people to administer the EKG on themselves.
Who knows, with patients doing millions of self studies, how much we would learn about what helps and hurts the heart.
We speak of ways to improve our health system. This too is a way, not just for the studies that could be achieved, but also just to be serving the customer, the patient, better.
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