Meg Weber Noel
Enterprise Marketing Manager
I’ll be honest with you; I am writing about this from an unusual angle. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a nurse. I’m a marketer who also happens to be a patient with chronic conditions. That combination has given me a front-row seat to something that I don’t think gets talked about enough: what happens to patients when they leave your office.
I can tell you from a personal experience. You close the visit, you hand me my paperwork, and I walk out into the world with a care plan, good intentions, and approximately zero clinical support until my next appointment or urgent call. And I’m one of the motivated ones because I actually read the paperwork.
Here’s a number I had to sit with for a while.
The average patient with a chronic condition spends fewer than 10 hours a year with their provider. I’m not great at math, but even I can tell you that leaves a staggering amount of time, over 6,000 hours on average, where that patient is completely on their own.
Six. Thousand. Hours. I kept trying to make that feel smaller and I couldn’t. I live it.
And in those hours, patients are making judgment calls that nobody trained them to make. Is this symptom worth a call or should I wait? Did I already take that medication or am I just hoping I did? Is this reading bad enough to do something about, or can it wait until Monday? I’ve asked myself every single one of those questions. Most of the time I talked myself into waiting. Sometimes that was fine. Sometimes it wasn’t.
I’ve spent a lot of time sitting inside medical practices, mostly as a patient in the waiting room, but I have also had the pleasure of shadowing in back offices, in ambulatory and inpatient hallways, watching how things actually run. I’ve seen staff working incredibly hard, the providers are stretched thin, and the patients who need the most support are the ones generating the most reactive work. They call more. They miss appointments and then need to reschedule urgently. They run out of medications at 4:45 on a Friday (guilty!). They end up in situations that, and I say this gently, really don’t need to go that far.
From the outside, it can look like these patients just aren’t trying. But here’s what I know from being one of them: we do try. It’s that managing a chronic condition between visits is genuinely hard, and most of us are doing it without a roadmap or a safety net. So… we wait. We guess. We hope. Yea, sometimes we end up in your office, or worse, the ER, for something that started as a small thing three months ago.
That’s not a patient failure. It’s not a provider failure either. It is a system gap.
Chronic conditions are not appointment-shaped problems, and our system is designed around the appointment-based model. Episodic care for a chronic condition is a little like only checking on a garden once a month and being surprised when the pants are eaten or dried up.
What these patients need, what I’ve needed, isn’t necessarily more appointments. With two kids, a full-time job (this one!), two dogs, a flock of chickens, and more, I don’t have time to run around from office to office every time I have a question about my readings. And you, as my provider, don’t have bandwidth and probably the staff to be on call just for me when I have four hundred questions every month. If there only was a way get attention in between that is convenient and easy for us both. This way of thinking leads to early intervention before a small thing has time to become a scary thing.
Here’s the part that’s started to change, and why I care enough to write about it.
Practices are building structure around what happens between visits and not by adding more work to their already-stretched teams. What if I told you, you can extend care in a way that’s manageable (and profitable) and when you implement this… something happens, something shifts. Small issues get caught while they’re still small. The reactive calls start to decrease because the proactive ones are happening instead. Now patients like me with chronic conditions (and decades of dealing with ADHD) have no chance to procrastinate, deviate, or hesitate. [Hooray!]
Those 6,000 hours stop being a place where patients go at it alone.
I don’t have all the answers, again marketing and not a doctor, but I’ve sat on both sides of this: in the exam room as a patient and in the back office watching a team try to hold it all together and I can tell you with certainty that the opportunity isn’t solely in the face-to-face visit.
It’s everything that happens after you close the door. If you’re reading this thinking “yes, but we don’t have the time or staff for that,” you’re not wrong. The good news is there are programs (guess what…? We have one!) that are built specifically to fill this gap without adding chaos, and they’re worth a closer look when you’re ready.
