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The Book of the Week is “The Calling, A Memoir of Family, Faith and the Future of Healthcare” by Dr. Chris Chen and Dr. Gordon Chen, published in 2022. In this wordy, redundant volume, the brother-authors recounted their family’s history.
The Chen brothers, their wives, and their parents have built a successful medical practice of value-based care. They began in South Florida, serving low-income senior citizens in poor health. Their primary-care physicians (formerly called “general practitioners”) are truly passionate about treating their patients as though the patients are their own loved ones.
The family’s business, ChenMed, gets a flat fee from health-insurance companies, rather than a fee per patient. It is up to the practice’s bean-counters to do preventive care to make the business profitable. Arrogant and greedy doctors need not apply to ChenMed.
The doctors do quality over quantity, seeing a maximum of four hundred fifty patients per month. They have maximized the efficiency in their business so that they can spend a lot more time with each individual patient. Initially, they see cardiac patients daily until they get to know them. Of course, there is an emotional toll on the medical personnel when there are inexplicable complications or deaths.
It appears ChenMed has bragging rights– in the last forty years, it has established an impressive presence in the United States. And its monster-sized competition has copied the concept of their business model.
The Chens practice not only medicine, but also Christianity. The family’s patriarch thinks that one who does not believe in a supreme being, does not have a moral compass. Yes, people who have a bible that’s falling apart, usually aren’t. But that doesn’t mean that people who don’t have a bible usually are falling apart. There are plenty of ways other than religion for people to relieve the stresses of daily life, and still behave ethically.
Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the family’s and ChenMed’s backgrounds.