Why would people who have all their other affairs in order — legal, financial, even groundskeepers — settle for a 15-minute slot?”<br />It’s a fair question — but the new approach does not sit so well with veteran practitioners like Dr. Henry Jones<br />III, one of Silicon Valley’s original concierge doctors at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation’s Encina Practice.<br />Although Private Medical provides its patients with doctors’ cellphone numbers<br />and same-day appointments, like more conventional concierge practices do, Dr. Shlain does not like the term “concierge care.”<br />“When I’m at a country club or a party and people ask me what I do, I say I’m an asset manager,” Dr. Shlain explained.<br />In fact, before founding Private Medical, Dr. Shlain, 50, worked as the on-call doctor at the Mandarin Oriental hotel<br />here, an experience he said taught him about how to provide five-star service as well as good medical care.<br />A third-generation doctor from Boston, Dr. Jones offers a version of concierge medicine<br />that is a way of providing more personalized service — the way doctors did when he graduated from medical school more than four decades ago — rather than delivering a different standard of care.<br />Indeed, as many Americans struggle to pay for health care — or even, with the future of the Affordable Care Act in question on Capitol Hill, face a<br />loss of coverage — this corner of what some doctors call the medical-industrial complex is booming: boutique doctors and high-end hospital wards.<br />“You have no idea how much money there is here,” said Dr. Harlan Matles, who specializes in internal medicine<br />and joined MD Squared after working at Stanford, where he treated 20 to 25 patients a day and barely had time to talk to them.
