Dr. Gregory G Markarian, MD, FACS
Chicago Orthopedic Surgeon, Dr. Gregory G Markarian specializes in the treatment of the shoulder, knee and all sports related injuries.
Dr. Markarian has served as a Team Physician for several professional and amateur sports teams, including the Miami Dolphins, the Florida Marlins, the United States Women's Professional Volleyball League, The University of Miami, Dade County Public Schools, Chicago Enforcers, Naperville Youth Football and Benet Academy.
With over 20 years of orthopedic experience, Dr. Markarian is not only highly skilled but is also pioneering new frontiers with Orthopedic Surgery. Dr. Markarian is a well-known expert in Single Portal Arthroscopy (SPA) - a new minimally invasive arthroscopic technique, designed to replace the need for two or three incisions required by standard arthroscopy.
Operating as a Private Practice to Give You the Most Comprehensive Care
I am proud to say that I am a private practitioner of orthopedic surgery and sports medicine. While that may not seem like a lot, with the recent changes in health care over the last eight years, private practitioners have been driven out of the marketplace in favor of a top-down model approach (hospitals and big companies employ physicians). This has negatively impacted healthcare experience for the patient.
Why you should only be treated by a Private Practitioner:
| Private Practice | Salaried Practitioners - hospitals, clinics, or agencies |
|---|---|
| Physician/Patient Relationship - This is a relationship in which mutual trust and confidence are essential. You have the power to choose the Physician based on their skills, abilities, and expertise. You are in control of selecting the best treater for your specific needs. | Lack of Choice - When treating with a hospital, clinic, or agency, your choices are muddled because most physicians are now employees of major institutions and have a complicated metric in terms of what their overall performance is or should be. |
| Simplicity of Selection - You pick your doctor if he/she provides excellent care, you are retained as a patient and can potentially refer others in need to the doctor. The doctor rates their success based on the retention rate of the patients. Doctors retain patients by providing state-of-the-art treatments, offering specific treatments based solely on the patients' needs, and having a character that displays: professionalism, knowledge, compassion, empathy, and respectfulness for you. You are not just a number, you are all that matters. | Salaried Practitioners Viewing Clients as Investments Instead of Patients - with the top-down approach the patient is completely forgotten, and the metrics are based on the employer and employee relationship, and the employee being the doctor, and the employer often being the hospital or major university medical setting. The metrics that they are looking at are return on investment and how the physician does with respect to that, and the ability of that physician to generate revenues for those institutions for which he works. The model has been completely turned on its head, and the patient has been forgotten in this whole process. This has been the evolution that has occurred over the last eight years since the changes have been made in the Affordable Care Act. It has virtually driven out physicians from private practice to become employees in larger institutions. Unfortunately, what has happened in this situation is the patient has not become the priority, but the metrics on return investment has. |
This marketplace environment that has occurred, unfortunately, has taken its toll on patients not only from the standpoint of increasing costs for premiums and deductibles, which have made health care very difficult to obtain, but also from the standpoint that a lot of the physicians that they do encounter when they do need healthcare, are employees who are judged by a metric that does not center around the patient but rather revolves around a return on investment for their employer. A big shift in emphasis and philosophy, and this is what is going on. I am very fortunate and lucky to not practice medicine in that environment. I am still in private practice.
This is a very difficult environment to stay in private practice, but I have always been on top of my business, and I have guided my business through very difficult waters to avoid having to sell or go out of business and have to work for an employer or hospital or university setting where my values would be dramatically altered, and my metrics and measurements would be completely antithetical to what I consider to be the appropriate doctor/patient relationship. I am in private practice, and I am only as good as my last patient and my last result.
So, I am continually working to try to accommodate my patients and make them first, and I have no other interests whatsoever. For these reasons, and the fact that I was also able to steer my practice away from many of the dangers that engulfed other practices that could not sustain themselves in this environment, is a blessing because I continue to have the ability to put my patients first. I feel that this is incredibly rewarding, and I have the ability not to have to succumb to other metrics that come into conflict with that relationship.
So when choosing a physician one of the things that should be asked is: "Are they in private practice or are they an employee?"
