"I left the public hospital for a private one… but I want to stay accessible."
A specialist told me that yesterday. And I saw myself in it, less than two years ago. During medical school, we're taught to diagnose, to treat, to save lives. We're taught to give everything.
But we're never taught how to build a practice, run a business, or create a sustainable kind of medicine. Even less how to put a value on our time. We're trained in a culture where you learn to follow the rules, not question the system, and accept its constraints as inevitable.
But being a good doctor doesn't just mean applying what we were taught. It also means having the courage to question a model when it no longer allows us to care for people properly.
After years of working within a system that undervalues our work, we end up internalizing a deeply rooted idea: our time isn't worth much.
So how do you ask a patient to pay?
I believe many doctors live with this guilt. I did too. But in 18 months, more than 3,200 patients have put their trust in us.
Because they were looking for something better.
They were looking for time.
Explanations.
A complete picture of their health.
An experience worthy of the name.
A high price is therefore no guarantee of quality. But ideally, higher fees allow a doctor to spend more time with each patient, to carry out a deeper, more personalized assessment rather than practicing volume medicine.
Of course, there are also charlatans who charge exorbitant fees or prescribe useless tests and biomarkers. We're also seeing startups ride the wave of preventive medicine, offering blood tests "analyzed by AI," sometimes with the promise that a doctor has reviewed them. Yet a simple blood test, even interpreted by a doctor or an algorithm, unfortunately can't properly assess someone's risk profile on its own.
Seventeen months ago, I made the choice to leave the conventioning system. It's one of the best decisions of my life, because it finally let me practice medicine that matches my values.
Today, I can offer patients an exceptional environment.
A space designed around the patient, probably one of the most beautiful medical centers in Belgium, with cutting-edge equipment, superior to what some hospitals can afford.
But above all, we've built a genuine connected health ecosystem: an app integrated with our medical software, letting patients track how their health data evolves over time, visualize their progress by tracking their data, and receive medical reports written for them.
Because the medicine of tomorrow won't just be a series of one-off consultations. It will be continuous, personalized, and based on understanding how each patient evolves.
But what I'm proudest of isn't the building, or the technology… (though, I admit, I'm still quite proud of our technology 🫶).
It's the time.
At the hospital, I had 15 minutes to see a patient. Fifteen minutes. Looking back, I realize I was practicing a kind of medicine that ultimately didn't have much impact on my patients' health trajectory.
We've built an extraordinary system to step in once disease is already present, but nothing to prevent it from appearing in the first place, because that isn't profitable.
Our hospital system does remarkable work, often with increasingly limited resources. Healthcare professionals perform miracles every day.
But they're burning out.
I know because I lived it myself.
What's frustrating is that our system mainly values the technical act, but far less the time spent listening, explaining, understanding, and preventing.
And yet, a valued doctor is a better doctor.
I also think it's time we, as doctors, take our share of responsibility.
Yes, our system doesn't value our work enough. But we've also accepted, for far too long, a model that isn't sustainable: asking for more investment, more responsibility, and more time, while accepting compensation that doesn't allow for quality medicine.
No other independent professional would accept working this way.
Wanting to stay accessible is essential. But accessibility can't be built at the cost of caregivers' burnout.
A medical center that wants to be accessible to as many people as possible, but isn't economically viable, will unfortunately end up disappearing.
A doctor who has to see too many patients a day ends up losing what gives their work its value: time, listening, and human connection.
I still believe in medicine that's more human, more personalized, and more preventive. Medicine that doesn't just settle for treating disease. Medicine that builds health.
Because it's time we practiced healthcare, and not just sickcare.
