Someone once asked me why I write so often about primary care when Merchant Medicine’s focus as a consulting firm is urgent care strategy, development and operations. It is a very legitimate question, and one that naturally leads to what I believe is a roadmap of how primary care and urgent care will evolve over the next few years....

While researching this article, I came across the following quotes: one from a doctor and one from a patient: From the doctor: “The inability to control the way we practice medicine and deliver care to patients is the reason that physicians are leaving medicine in record numbers. I can tell you that on an ordinary working day, if I didn’t have a single patient to see, I would still be busy for eight or nine hours doing nothing but paperwork and phone calls that are directly related to managed-care issues.”...