Background factors – The Business Opportunity

The only relevant metric for a patient seeking healthcare is a successful health outcome, with the exception of certain end-of-life issues. Currently, the providers and payers of healthcare: doctors, health plans, insurance companies etc. systematically ignore this critical metric1 . Patient outcomes are simply not measured in a meaningful way – except by 4Healing.

"In all fairness, I don’t think most doctors and hospitals even have a clue as to what their results are. It’s not been a normal part of American medicine to provide that type of performance measurement or profiling of providers." – Dr. Sam Ho, Chief Medical Officer, PacifiCare (NY Times television 2007)

Practitioners do not know their own outcomes, much less the outcomes of other doctors to whom they refer patients. 4Healing is the only source available that allows patients and doctors to choose an optimal practitioner for their specific problems based on the practitioners success working with their condition as reported by outcomes feedback. Practitioners with exactly the same credentials and experience have widely different outcomes. Years of outcomes data collected by 1-800-DOCTORS showed that medical outcomes matched physician reputation only 16% of the time. Fully 84% of patients experienced superior outcomes from lesser known, sometimes obscure practitioners. Except for 4HEALING there is no objective way to differentiate practitioner success for a patient’s specific concern.