With the aging of the population and the continuous increase in the number of young people living alone, professional escort services with "running errands" as the main business have quietly emerged——
Can Occupational Accompanying Clinics Ease the Difficulty of Seeking a Doctor?
With the aging of the population and the rising number of young people living alone, the professional escort clinic industry is quietly emerging. The professional escort industry plays an active role in patients, families, hospitals, and society, but there are still many problems such as low entry barriers for practitioners, unclear boundaries of rights and responsibilities, market irregularities, and information asymmetry. In this regard, it is necessary to strengthen the professional escort clinic industry norms, unblock consumer complaints and reporting channels, promote the formation of industry autonomy, take multiple measures to alleviate the difficulty of seeking medical treatment, and realize the comprehensive management of the professional escort clinic industry.
In the future, with the continuous development of "Internet + medical care", the maturity of smart medical care, online medical treatment, home medical treatment and other forms will greatly reduce the difficulty of citizens' medical treatment, and the professional medical escort service with simple "running errands" as the main business will also adapt to the times. facing transformation.
Professional escort to solve medical needs
Occupational escort is a profession that accompanies patients to the hospital to see a doctor, provides diagnosis and treatment guidance, substitutes for queuing, receives medicines, accompanies communication, and transports meals and other related services.
The main customers are patients who have difficulty seeking medical care independently, including the elderly, pregnant women, disabled people and people living alone, among which the elderly account for more than 60%.
Data shows that in the past year, 26,000 people searched Taobao for keywords related to “accompanying doctor”. There are more than 500 stores providing escort services on e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD. There are also online platforms dedicated to providing escort services.
The quietly emerging professional escort industry plays a role in patients, families, hospitals, and society at all levels.
In terms of patients, professional escort consultation can meet their needs to improve the efficiency of consultation, simplify procedures, and alleviate loneliness.
At present, there are a large number of people living alone in my country. According to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, as of 2018, the population of single adults in my country has reached 240 million, of which more than 77 million adults are living alone. It is expected that this data will continue to rise.
Individuals who live alone face various difficulties due to lack of escort when they are sick and seek medical treatment. At this time, professional escort provides great convenience for them.
An escort staff said that among the escort services for young people he handled, the most common ones were gastroscopes and induced abortions.
These young people are alone. On the one hand, they don’t want to bother friends to accompany them, and on the other hand, they don’t want their family members to know their worries. Therefore, when anesthesia is required or someone must be accompanied, paying to accompany the doctor is the best choice.
In addition, people are most likely to feel loneliness when they are sick, and professional escort clinics can fill this loneliness through escort and communication.
In the case of visiting doctors in different places, the advantages of professional escort are more prominent.
Patients flock to large hospitals in first-tier cities in pursuit of better treatment methods, and are completely unfamiliar with the new medical treatment environment. The off-site escort service can help patients efficiently complete the procedures such as registration, payment, medicine collection, and surgery, so as to avoid delays in the best diagnosis and treatment. The opportunity to reduce the economic burden of treatment costs, accommodation costs and other aspects.
On the family side, professional escort clinics can fully coordinate the time of family members.
With the increasing number of elderly people in my country and the widespread use of intelligent technology in the medical system, the difficulty of seeing a doctor for the elderly has gradually increased.
According to the results of the seventh census, my country's population aged 60 and above is 264 million, accounting for 18.70% of the total population, an increase of 5.44% compared with the results of the sixth census.
At the same time, the classification of hospital departments has been continuously refined, and procedures such as registration and payment have been gradually networked. The elderly usually need others to explain and assist in the whole process when seeking medical treatment.
When the elderly's children or other family members are busy with work or difficult to escape, professional escort clinics can be urgently needed.
In addition, if there are pregnant women and other members of the family who are inconvenient and often go to the doctor, there is also a greater demand for professional escort services.
In hospitals, professional escort consultation can improve the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment and service quality to a certain extent.
Some of the escorts have worked as hospital nurses, insurance company claims adjusters, etc., and are familiar with the medical field, so they can become a bridge between hospitals and patients.
For example, they can inquire about the patient's situation in detail when waiting in line, help them to describe accurately when inquiring, and also help doctors to remind patients of medication time and precautions, and remind patients to follow up in a timely manner, saving patients effort and worry, and also allowing doctors Efficient consultation.
Professional escort can also guide patients to go to regular medical institutions, reduce the risk of patients being deceived, identify improper medical treatment, improve the quality of medical services and promote the development of the medical industry through reporting and supervision.
In the social aspect, professional escort consultation is beneficial to ease the doctor-patient relationship and create a harmonious social atmosphere.
Long waiting time, barriers to communication with doctors, misunderstanding of doctor's attitude, etc. are the most common reasons for doctor-patient conflicts, and occupational medical treatment can replace patients' queuing, deal with time-consuming and laborious trivial matters, and at the same time help patients understand doctors and mediate doctor-patient conflicts. Objectively, it plays a role in reducing the incidence of conflicts between doctors and patients and maintaining social stability.
There are hidden dangers in professional escort clinics
However, my country's occupational escort industry is in its infancy, and there are still many hidden dangers.
The entry threshold for professional escort practitioners is low.
The current escort agency platform can be roughly divided into two operating modes.
The first is that the company recruits escorts, uniformly trains, assigns work, and pays. Standardized internal regulations and personnel recruitment processes provide a certain guarantee for service quality.
The second is a business model similar to "Ele.me" and other takeaway software, that is, an open platform for medical escorts to register and take orders on the platform.
In the second mode, professional escorts, regardless of whether they have relevant professional skills or not, only need to register on the platform to engage in professional escorts, and most of them are part-time escorts, which cannot really provide medical convenience, but may increase the burden on patients.
The boundaries of rights and responsibilities of the main body of professional escort clinics are unclear.
There are no special provisions for professional escort clinics in Chinese law, and mature industry practices have not been formed in practice. The division of rights and obligations among hospitals is not clear.
For example, if a patient is harmed during the treatment process, it may be difficult to distinguish between the hospital's diagnosis and treatment errors and the professional escort's communication errors, which makes it more difficult to protect their rights.
Another example is that patients face the risk of information leakage.
When receiving the escort service, the patient needs to inform the service provider of personal information such as ID card, medical information, contact information, address, etc. If the professional escort is not bound by the confidentiality measures, it is very likely to leak the patient's information, or even sell it through sales. Seek illegal benefits, thereby causing intrusion into the private life of patients.
The professional escort clinic market is not standardized and the information is asymmetric.
At present, multiple channels such as housekeeping service companies, escort apps, second-hand platforms, social apps, and online shopping platforms can order escort services, but the prices of services with similar content vary greatly, some as low as 50 yuan, and some as high as 600 yuan. Yuan.
The service price is generally adjusted according to the difficulty of diagnosis and treatment and the length of time. The time can be clearly defined by calculation, but the so-called "difficulty" is difficult to quantify.
It can be seen that the pricing power is completely in the hands of operators, and large platforms can use their strong positions to conduct vicious competition and control service prices, leaving consumers at a disadvantage.
In addition, each platform can operate without relevant qualification certificates, management standards are different, and industry norms are absent.
Countermeasures for the management of disorder in professional escort clinics
The occupational escort industry is related to the key rights and interests of patients, such as the right to life, the right to health, and the right to privacy, and it is urgent to regulate governance to protect the legitimate rights and interests of citizens.
Strengthen professional escort consultation industry norms.
Establish a certification and qualification management mechanism for professional escort clinics, clarify the subject of administrative supervision, and focus on regulating vocational skills training, service charging standards, and service quality standards.
For example, setting up professional training institutions, stipulating relevant vocational examinations, requiring practitioners to have professional skills in medicine and first aid, etc., strengthen practitioners' moral concepts.
Set up certain access thresholds, and make regulations on the education level and professional experience of practitioners.
In this regard, we can learn from South Korea’s experience. The proportion of “one-person households” in the capital, Seoul, is as high as 34.9%. Seoul has launched a “safe medical treatment” service. Citizens can apply by phone before seeking medical treatment, and enjoy the registration, payment, hospitalization and discharge procedures. Professional escort service.
Personnel providing services need to be screened and reviewed by specialized agencies, and the high professionalism of personnel ensures the orderly development of the escort industry.
Unblock the channels for consumer complaints and reports.
On August 31, 2019, the market supervision department has integrated the original consumer rights protection platforms in various fields into the national 12315 platform, providing 7 × 24 hours of services through PC, mobile, WeChat applet, Alipay applet and other portals. Users can file complaints anytime, anywhere through this platform.
The provision of professional escort services is a business operation, and the complaint process of the escort industry should be improved, and patients should be guided and encouraged to make complaints and reports through the consumer rights protection platform after their legitimate rights and interests are infringed, so as to safeguard their own legitimate rights and interests, purify the ecological environment of the industry, and reduce the risk of failure. Force the professional escort platform to pay close attention to the quality of service.
Promote the formation of industry autonomy.
Strengthening industry autonomy can not only reduce the pressure of government administrative supervision, but also reduce the friction between professional escort clinics and medical institutions, and promote the healthy development of the professional escort clinic industry through market development and policy guidance.
The active role of industry associations should be brought into full play, and the order of market competition should be maintained by promulgating relevant norms such as staff appointment standards and escort standards.
Encourage the professional escort platform to strengthen the standardization and continuous innovation. In this regard, you can learn from the experience of Japan's elderly care services. At present, the three major elderly care companies in Japan, Benes Holdings, Japan Medical Museum, and Loss Insurance Holdings are competing in terms of service standards, staff levels and With the continuous upgrading of hardware equipment and attracting customers through reasonable prices, the healthy competition of the three companies has gradually formed a high-level nursing care industry in Japan, providing high-quality escort services and other thoughtful maintenance services.
At the same time, professional escorts are encouraged to take the initiative to improve their professional and moral level, strengthen the confidentiality awareness of patients' privacy, actively learn relevant medical knowledge, and have a deep understanding of the hospital's department structure and treatment process, so as to truly become a bridge between patients and doctors.
Various measures have been taken to alleviate the difficulty of seeking medical treatment.
The disorder of professional escort clinics occurs most frequently in areas where medical resources are scarce. When patients cannot obtain medical assistance through normal channels, they go to the doctor in a hurry, leaving professional escorts who lack professional ability or even intend to make illegal profits.
Therefore, if the current situation of difficulty in seeking medical treatment can be further improved, the disorder of professional escort consultation can be alleviated to a certain extent.
The "14th Five-Year Plan" proposes to expand the capacity of high-quality medical resources, solve the problems of uneven high-quality medical resources and medical treatment in different places, and at the same time strengthen the grass-roots public health system.
In the local "14th Five-Year Plan", Beijing, Fujian, Guizhou and other places proposed measures such as telemedicine and "Internet + medical health" to solve the "last mile" problem of medical treatment.
The government should speed up the construction and improvement of the public service system, especially the elderly medical care service system, and strengthen the supervision and rectification of illegal diagnosis and treatment behaviors and irregular medical platforms.
At the same time, hospitals are encouraged to take the initiative to improve their medical service capabilities by providing on-site visits, realizing patient triage, increasing the number of professional staff, improving administrative efficiency, and providing new diagnosis and treatment methods such as online consultation.
(Author: Deng Yong, Professor of Law Department of Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine)