Meet the wealthy with a private doctor – at $40,000 a year

When people ask Dr. Jordan Shalin to describe his medical practice, he says simply: “It’s a family office for your health.”

“Family offices are generally meant to preserve wealth,” he said. “Our goal is to protect your health. After age 24, you are a depreciating asset in terms of health. So our goal is to minimize the decline as much as possible.”

As depressing as it sounds to patients, Schlein’s strategy is paying off as a business model. his company, Private Medical, is at the forefront of a new type of healthcare for the ultra-rich that has taken concierge medicine to a whole new level. Rather than just offering on-call doctors and quick visits, Private Medical has pioneered a highly personalized, all-round service akin to sophisticated family offices for investment.

Like family offices, Private Medical has an in-house team to manage the family’s entire health portfolio – from fitness and nutritional tracking to longevity research, surgeries and medical emergencies. It now serves more than 1,000 wealthy families, with offices in California — San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills — New York and Miami, and more on the way.

The private medical team of 135 doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists and medical support professionals provides 24/7 on-call service, including home and office visits as needed. Private Medical does not advertise and gets most of its business through referrals. It prefers to call patients “members”.

Schlein declined to disclose pricing details, but private medical clients say he charges $40,000 a year for each adult patient and $25,000 for each patient under 18. The annual fee covers the cost of office visits, tests and procedures, but not hospitalization.

The rise of family office-style medical practices – some of which are charging up to $60,000 a year for memberships – has led to increased wealth and hyper-personalized, data-driven health care in families worth $100 million or more. shows the increasing demand for An aging class of billionaires and millionaires.

According to Presidency Research, the market for concierge and personal medical services for the wealthy is expected to grow 50 percent to nearly $11 billion annually by 2032.

Insurance companies, overloaded doctors and inflated prices have turned the health care system into a “sick care system,” Shalin says. Private medicine, for those who can afford it, aims to be proactive, perform frequent tests and diagnoses on patients, constantly update them with new research and science, and adapt to the patient’s lifestyle, habits. , getting detailed information about family life and work life, Shlain said.

Schlein, whose father was a laparoscopic surgeon and whose mother had a Ph.D. in psychology, began making house calls for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in San Francisco. He took a “crash course” in high-end hospitality from top hotel concierges and realized that healthcare should be more like five-star hotel service than long wait times and an impersonal system of error-ridden diagnoses. Should.

“I will know everything about you to help you make the best decisions of your life,” he said. “I’m 70% doctor, 15% psychologist, 10% rabbi and 1% friend.”

Schlein said the job of private medicine is often to protect its patients from the broader medical system. One of his patients, a 38-year-old businessman and donor at a major hospital, was admitted for an intestinal obstruction. The CEO of the hospital and the Chief of Surgery arrived to begin the surgery. Schlein pushed back and recommended waiting a day or two. The patient recovered on his own while in the hospital and was discharged without surgery, Shalin said.

Shlain also creates personalized medical kits for patients to take with them when they travel or work. When a patient scratched his cornea while playing beach volleyball in the Bahamas, the patient was able to treat his eye with a prescription in his medical kit rather than seeking a hospital on one of the nearby islands.

As with most services for the ultra-wealthy, the main advantage of private medical is accessibility. Schlein has spent more than 20 years building relationships with more than 4,000 experts in various medical and scientific fields to connect patients with the right person for their specific needs.

With roots in Silicon Valley and many tech clients, Private Medical is also involved with biotech startups looking for cutting-edge research and new treatments. Private medical does due diligence for four or five new companies a month to keep pace with rapidly changing science and research, Shalin said.

When a patient was diagnosed with severe depression, Schlein worked with a new “precision psychiatry” group at Stanford that performed brain MRIs and used connectomes (maps of neural connections in the brain) to determine the Which drug is best for treatment? .

“He got the right medication, and he’s better now,” Shalin said.

Private Medical also prides itself on its technology, which has been developed with some of the top CEOs and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Its platform helps both doctors and patients easily access data, manage appointments and workflow.

Two major areas for his wealthy patients are longevity and sleep. As for longevity, Shalin said there is no magic pill or diet or drug that can turn back time, even for billionaires. The ultimate goal is to “enable you to maintain your physical and mental capabilities with minimal, high-quality interactions with the health care system,” he said.

He said that your good result is our income.