What Is “Primary” In Finding a Primary Care Doctor: Dr. Kevin Spencer of Premier Family Physicians on Finding Your PCP
Speaker 1:
Welcome back to the Armour men’s health hour with dr. Mystery and Donna Lee . Hello,
Speaker 2:
Welcome to the armor men’s health hour. I’m dr. Mr . Your host as always with my wonderful, beautiful and lovely. Oh no, you done . He got me confused with that . My practice manager. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m a board certified urologist men’s health cohost, and an award winning cohost . That’s right. As far as we know, dumb dumbs and Dingalings and dumb, dumb. Very good. Thank goodness that you got so many awards when you were in junior high so that we can rebrand them for ourselves. This show is brought to you by NAU urology specialists. We are a urology specialty practice that has been in practice since 2007, 13 years, 13 years in your state . And your name is still mystery. T R Y. People think that dr . Mystery is a gimmick. It’s a fake name. It’s really hurtful when my wife says it. Okay . Oh, Krista , no , you can’t say her name. He actually got on me today about how we never include her in the show. And I was like, well, every time we talk about your husband, we talk about it , right? Well, does she have something like big boobs that we can talk about? She’s amazing. She was pretty hot, right ? Um , this is a men’s health show. We talk about a number of men’s health topics that affect our community. And we’ve been so happy to bring this show to you for the last, almost a year and a half feels like 13 years. I mean, the last year I felt like two years. Uh , Donna don’t you tell people about where our practices are and how people get hold of . We are all over central Texas. We’re in round rock, North Austin, South Austin, and dripping Springs, Texas, cute little dripping Springs, or you can reach us during the week at (512) 238-0762 . Our website is Armour men’s health.com and you can send us your amazing anonymous questions to Armour men’s health@gmail.com. And we have a special guest today. We need to get to, we do, and I’ll tell you something. I’m a little disappointed that his radio voice is better than mine. Yeah, well, most of them are. We have today, dr. Kevin Spencer from premier family physicians , premier family physicians is one of our best partners all throughout South Austin and an amazing group of doctors. And Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So, you know, as a urologist, we are really dependent upon the referrals from primary care doctors and their evaluation. And one of the most common questions that we get from patients is what should I look for when I’m looking for a primary care doctor? And for us, it’s all about the interaction that that doctor and the patient have that we see. And we see them in notes. We see them in how they’re cared for how their chronic diseases are taken care of. And so from your standpoint, I’d love for you to talk about what is kind of the goal of primary care medicine. And especially in this world where a lot of people do their own research and go to their own doctor, like, you know, why even have a primary care
Speaker 3:
Doctor? Yeah, that’s a, it’s a great question. Um, I think the cornerstone of primary care is really the doctor patient relationship itself. You know, before you have a very specific need blood in your urine, a kidney stone and abnormal lung lab test , where we would send people to a urologist, you know, the global holistic view of that whole person, what are their health goals? What’s their life view? What do they want out of health? What scares them about sickness what’s happened to their family? What are things that we could prevent much earlier in the course so that instead of the big surgery or the worst outcome, they have something much more minor because they have a relationship that’s trusted where they share their symptoms. So relationship to me, finding a physician who’s, well-trained part of a group that can deliver care, where you have the results returned to you in a timely fashion, but really someone you’re comfortable sharing your story with I’m about one out of three people we see in the primary care setting , um, have either depression, anxiety, or sleep disorder. So a big piece of what we do is, is designed to think about that person holistically, not only their physical health, but also their mental health. And so I think the world has changed rapidly in the last year. So when you say relationship, I think the ability to use technology to leverage that relationship. So we have the ability to do telehealth visits. We have a patient portal where people can email and connect with us in real time, schedule their appointments online and get to us having a great doctor who listened to you. Doesn’t do you much good if you can’t get to them, if there’s too many barriers to care. So, so being accessible as kind of that first place into the system, when you do your own research, potentially you may end up going out into the healthcare marketplace and wasting a specialist’s time. And you thought you needed a neurologist, but you really needed an ear nose and throat, or you thought you needed a kidney specialist, but because you thought something was the kidney, but it’s really within the field of urology. So that, that drives up costs . It wastes the patient’s time. It wastes the specialist time. So that’s, that’s a big piece of what we’re geared to do.
Speaker 2:
Great example you you’ve raised. I mean, I get probably twice a week, somebody referred to me because of a concern about kidney failure. And I hate to tell them like, I’m a surgeon, you know, unless you want your kidney cut on. And this idea of having a relationship with a physician is such an important concept because I think that unfortunately too many people self-diagnose , or they feel like the type of care they’re going to get from that doctor, isn’t going to be exactly what they envisioned. And unfortunately, I think that so many patients lose out on the idea of having, you know, a family practitioner or an internal medicine doctor really taking care of their global health, because I mean, as good of a doctor , as I think I am, I’m probably not going to deal with your other medical issues quite as well as a primary care doctor will.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. And I mean, I think if you just think about what our story’s going to be, our health story, we may need you, but for, for a very specific episode, but the things we take care of, they’re the kinds of things that we manage. We don’t cure oftentimes, you know, your blood pressure. Well , if you manage that instead of a stroke at 68, you get to die of something else when you’re 102, because we did that. Well, if your blood sugar starts to rise, if we can work on your weight and your sleep and your mood and your exercise patterns, these are things that are really geared at being healthy. The other thing is there’s there’s screening tests that are recommended that save lives, mammograms, colon, cancer, screening, certain immunizations. These are things that we make sure and shepherd your health and help you keep up with along the way. So we’re sort of that person who’s kind of riding in the seat next to you for the whole story. And yeah, you may need your gallbladder out and we’re going to go get that person and they’re going to help us. And they’re going to be the best person in the city. That’s our duty to you. And then you may go a little bit longer and maybe your kidney function does worse than, and we need to get that specialist involvement and thoughtfulness about how we would help manage that. So those are the way to think about it as we were the primary relationship within the healthcare field. And that is designed to then walk you through all of the rest of your story. A lot of it, we treat many times we will rely on our specialist colleagues for very specific needs that, that they have specialty in that we would, we would utilize.
Speaker 2:
And it may seem unfair, but like as a specialist, we really rely on you to be the quarterback of that patient’s care. So if I’m seeing somebody and I do a scan of them and they have a lung nodule or a thyroid nodule or a blood clot in their legs, like these are things that I don’t take care of. So I tell you, and so if you don’t have a, you , if you’re a patient out there and you don’t have a primary care doctor or a relationship that I can rely on, then a lot of things get lost in the crack .
Speaker 3:
Yeah. I mean, that’s a piece of what’s going on in our healthcare system that I would like to think we’re beginning to be at the starting line of fixing. This is that’s exactly right. That kind of fragmented care are where results get lost. People aren’t followed up. You know, you may tell a scared patient, Hey, you have a nodule. You really, really need to go to this other doctor. And after they sit on that for a week and they’re not having any symptoms from it, they forget about it. And lo and behold, six or 12 months later, they’re presenting with a very bad problem where, you know, you send that result to their primary care doctor. We reach out to them . We have the ability to put them into a tickler system in our computer. If we haven’t seen them in three or four weeks. And we told them to come in and we’ll, we’ll get ahold of them again. We’re busy people. This is not always done out of denial. It’s not always done out of a lack of belief of needing to seek care. The world is incredibly frenetic and people can forget. And it’s our job to really shepherd their care when a situation like that.
Speaker 2:
So in the Austin market, I hear oftentimes from patients that they’re concerned that if they’re a Medicare patient or a Medicare advantage patient, they’re not going to be able to find a doctor like a it’s funny to me because I take all patients of all insurances and people out there are really worried that people won’t take their insurance. Maybe you could talk about that and how premier kind addresses that issue. Yeah ,
Speaker 3:
I think that’s one of the things I’m most proud of is really in the last three or four years, is our ability to really change our model for our senior patients. So number one, we’re wide open to Medicare. We’re wide open to Medicare advantage. We would love to see the senior community come into premier . We’ve developed a lot of expertise in this area. We have care management nurses, so certain people of a certain age and a certain functional status. They need more than a doctor. They need a nurse reaching out to them. That’s their primary nurse who may come visit them at their house. They may come visit them to their PCP appointment. They may help them with their medication costs so that it’s an extension of their PCP visits . So we have nursing care management , um , where we’re beginning to look at transportation services that we’re going to provide for our patients. And so we’re, we’re looking at other models of care that we can deliver more to the senior, but certainly from an access standpoint, if you’re a patient in Austin, Texas, and one of our locations is anywhere near close to you. Um, we would love to see you and keeping people out of the hospital and out of the emergency room is such a humongous benefit. And so people are trying to make an appointment with a primary care doctor or an internal medicine doctor. How do they get ahold of you? What’s your website and phone number? Yeah. So that’s a great question. Our website is www.pfpdocs.com. And our phone number is (512) 892-7076. And that’ll be on our Facebook page and on the transport and the site and how to be able to get ahold of us.
Speaker 1:
Five one two, two, three eight [inaudible] and we’ll be right back
Speaker 3:
The armor men’s health hour. We’ll be right back. If you have questions for dr. Mystery, email him at Armo men’s health ed gmail.com.