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Friday, September 30, 2005

We Meet at Last

Tonight 19 of us got together for dinner. For most of us, it was the first time we had ever met face to face, even though we had been communicating for over a year. We are physicians who participate in the Practice Improvement listserve, an e-mail group started by Dr. Gordon Moore, father of the low overhead, high tech practice model. We also happened to be in San Francisco attending the Annual Scientific Assembly of the AAFP.

It was very nice for us to meet Gordon Moore, the pioneer who started it all, along with each other. Some have booming practices in Albuquerque, NM, Lexington, KY or Bellevue, WA. Others are getting ready to make the leap, or at least try to muster up the courage to do so. We shared experiences and stories, and encouraged each other. We all agreed that open access rocks, that we love surprising patients by answering our own phones and telling them we can see them today, instead of making them wait 3 weeks (or more). We shared tips about billing, electronic medical records and computers. We talked about how much we enjoyed being able to go home at a decent hour and spend time with our families. We loved being able to do the right thing for patients, and in a way that made medicine fun again.

As one person said, "This is probably the largest concentration of happy family doctors in town tonight." I think he is not far from the truth.