Meet Your Chief Medical Officer: Dr. Suzanne Morgan

"You can talk about two complaints."

Imagine a sign like this hanging in your doctor's office. How would it make you feel? What if you have more than two complaints? How do you prioritize your health concerns with overt pressure to keep it short and sweet? For most Americans, this is the unfortunate reality of their healthcare situation.

But Dr. Suzanne Morgan didn't get into family medicine to reduce patients to two complaints or fewer–she got into medicine to make a difference. With PeopleOne Health, she's finally starting to feel like making a difference is possible. "The PeopleOne Health model is what you envision taking care of patients will be like before you start medical school," she shares. "Then, through medical school and residency, you come to the quick realization that you're going to see 20 to 30 people a day, you're going to be prioritizing their problems based on what they tell you and you have a limited amount of time to decipher what those problems may be."

Traditional healthcare suffers from a power struggle over priorities: physicians and nurses want to focus on well-rounded care, while hospital systems and insurance companies are in the business of making money. With hospital systems and insurance companies footing the bills, the money often wins out in the struggle between profit and patient, which sets up barriers to care, rushed visits between doctors and patients, confusing and expensive bills, and, ultimately, a lack of trust. After all, how can a trusting relationship be established when the national average for time spent with a primary care physician is just 9.2 minutes at an annual visit?

According to Dr. Morgan, that 18 minutes simply isn't enough time to make a lasting impression or influence positive health change. "People don't make changes unless they understand why you're asking for it, even if it's taking medicine to treat something," she explains. "The current system pushes for volume [and to] make more money, and you don't have time to build relationships with patients so they feel free to ask questions and trust you enough not to go to the internet for research. If you provide answers to their questions and take time to help them understand why they should take the next steps, there's a lot more success in treating a condition or resolving a condition."

To build trust from the start, patients at PeopleOne Health receive a full hour with their physician on their first visit. During that hour, Dr. Morgan says the physician will go over preventive care information based on your gender and age, medications, any chronic conditions, results of a physical, how to take advantage of PeopleOne Health services and more. "When I first switched to this model of care, all I could think was 'It's too good to be true,' Dr. Morgan says. "I thought, you get to spend 30 to 60 minutes with a patient? This is nuts!"

Since joining the team in early 2022, Dr. Morgan says she's already heard from patients who similarly struggle to fully wrap their head around the access they have to their primary care physician and the offerings included with their benefits. She's ready to take on the doubters and make believers of every single one. On top of the uninterrupted time to meet with a primary care physician, patients also have access to an on-site pharmacy, telemedicine, physical therapy, mental health and social work services, and labs. While it may seem unbelievable at first, the goal is to eliminate barriers and ensure no patient ever has to decide between paying a copay for physical therapy or picking up a prescription, between getting chest pain checked on and finding a therapist to treat depression.

Plus, for physicians, by eliminating the middleman (insurance, outside resources) and extra costs (copays, out-of-network premiums), they're able to act as the quarterback of the patients care and coordinate everything in-house–making it less likely that patients will find excuses to avoid advocating for and taking part in both their current and long-term health. When everything is right at their fingertips, why wouldn't they feel empowered and encouraged to take your health into your hands?

Most importantly, with PeopleOne Health, Dr. Morgan hopes no one ever feels bullied by a sign announcing an arbitrary "two complaints only" rule (which, for the record, is a real sign her father saw in an exam room at his own doctor's office).

"I hope we grow to a point where, nationally, patients realize that this is the way medicine could be [and this] is the way my everyday medical problems should be taken care of." Dr. Morgan says. "Before somebody leaves my office, my last question to them before I wish them well is typically 'Is there anything else that I can do for you today?'. And patients say all the time, 'I've never had a physician ask me that’. In the fee-for-service model, when you're seeing 20 or 30 people a day, the goal is to get to the next patient, so the last thing we're trained to do is ask for more problems. But with PeopleOne Health, we're trying to treat people and educate them about their wellness and prevent disease–not just treat what they walk in the door with and send them out. We want to take care of the patient's needs while they're here and not leave the patient alone to figure out if a complaint or concern is important enough to talk about."

Learn more: https://peopleonehealth.com/