Suzanne McGee
07/01/2005
Mark Wayne was in the best shape of his life when he blew out his knee during a family skiing holiday in late March. When he limped home to Michigan, the 40-year-old financial services entrepreneur discovered he had torn a ligament.
“It turns out that I’m going to have to have surgery if I want to
go skiing again any time soon,” he says. To reach this prognosis, Wayne spent
what could have been a grueling, confusing afternoon at his local hospital
consulting with surgeons and physicians. “It seems that every word those
surgeons used was two inches long,” he observes.Wayne, however, was accompanied by his personal, retainer-based physician, John Blanchard, who interpreted the medical vernacular for him during his four-hour hospital sojourn. After leaving the hospital, Blanchard spent another hour with Wayne, reviewing treatment options and spelling out in plain English exactly what the specialists had been saying.
This level of attention, available whenever and wherever Wayne needs it, comes with the annual retainer of about $10,000 he pays Blanchard and the doctor’s new concierge practice, Premier Private Physicians, in Southfield, Mich. Wayne claims that he has never waited more than 10 minutes to hear back from Blanchard. “When I mentioned to him on the phone from work that my son was having some periods of shortness of breath when he played hockey, Blanchard was at my house checking it out before I even got home,” he says.
In Wayne’s case, the guidance he received at the hospital was well worth the price of the retainer. “Having that kind of intermediary, someone who was in my corner, helped me deal with the stress and make informed decisions,” Wayne says.
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