Regardless of the quality of care that’s being offered, another issue facing the medical community and patients worldwide is the rising cost of health insurance.
“Medical services are the only business sector in the world where the costs and fees of the services we provide are negotiated between an insurance provider and the purchaser. In many instances, the patients are not involved in the process, and the doctors certainly aren’t involved,” Bates says.
“That’s not a typical business practice, but something that we have to be able to cope with and adjust to as the prices are negotiated for us. We become third parties in our own work, but it’s the way that the system works.”
Bates gets excited when he talks about the future for the medical field. He said that one of the biggest changes he sees on the horizon is being brought about by the development of technology. “Technologies that support medicine today are changing, actually exploding, and I only see that accelerating in the future,” Bates says. “Just during the course of my career, there have been so many changes.” Bates is particularly interested in what the field of biotechnology has to offer: “One of the things that I see happening with the biotechnology revolution is that hospitals will have the ability to make treatments that are custom built for a particular patient and their particular needs.” Rather than technology removing personalization of care, as it has typically been predicted, Bates sees the improvements in technology giving doctors the ability to make treatments very personal and very individual, but still very affordable. “Imagine physicians having the ability to make a pharmaceutical treatment for your specific needs with your medical history and overall medical condition in mind, but still costing the same as bulk-made pharmaceuticals. That’s a revolution in patient care and in cost control,” Bates says. He says that the strategy of learning and methods of thinking that he learned while at Reed are skills that he still uses today in this work. |
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