Can't Find a Doctor? You're Not Alone

And one of the more intriguing efforts aims to make the customer happy. When Amber Meiwes's husband shot a nail into his leg working construction in January 2007, she remembered that a doctor down the road had just opened a practice. Shortly after she sent her husband off, the phone rang. It was the doctor, Ric Corman, saying that Steven had to go to the hospital immediately for surgery, "and by the way don't let your husband tell you he doesn't need to go." Corman checked on him every day "and met him at the office on Sunday to give him antibiotics," says Amber, who quickly switched practices herself and takes their 1- and 3-year-old daughters to Corman. She can get a same-day appointment when the kids are sick and particularly likes that the office is open Tuesday and Thursdays until 8 p.m. and on Saturdays. "Everything's about good customer service," she says.

"I wanted to do it the old way and be a small-town doc," says Corman, whose two physician assistants deal with the sore throats and runny noses, while his office staff deals with insurance preauthorizations and such. He has time to take family histories, call specialists to synchronizecare, and really get to know his patients. "These people are not only my patients; they're my neighbors and my friends." His practice is being studied as part of a two-year experiment by the American Academy of Family Physicians testing out the "patient-centered medical home," a new approach to primary care. "This stuff really works," says Terry McGeeney, president and CEO of TransforMED, the AAFP project. In the past year, commercial insurers and large employers have become interested and are working with the National Committee on Quality Assurance, which accredits hospitals, to figure out how to compensate doctors so they're rewarded rather than penalized for spending time with patients.

Finding a doctor. For people who don't live near a Ric Corman, perseverance and old-fashioned word of mouth remain the best hope. Most people have to rely on friends' opinions to try to figure out who's good and who's not—and on luck to find a good doctor who takes their insurance and accepts new patients. A few resources, none of them perfect, can be found here.

When friends and family ask to become patients at his practice, David Dale says he most likely will reply that he can't take on new patients. But Dale, who is in a group practice at the University of Washington (where he used to be dean of the medical school), allows that "you might get in because you're in our hospital or because people want to be nice." So, as a last resort, begging might help.