O’Rourke also sees more effective ways to use the thousands of dollars that would, in the past, have been spent to take a group of 20 or 25 NPs to dinner at a fancy restaurant in Boston and provide an expert speaker. “It’s an expensive proposition, and if you’re doing that across the country for many, many groups, you’re talking millions of dollars,” she says. “That money could absolutely go into research and development. It could clearly go to supporting the indigent drug programs for patients who don’t have any health insurance. Instead of being able to give them a sample pack of five pills, maybe they could get a month’s supply of their prescription.
“It has to come back to the patient. In health care, at some point, you lose sight of what’s right and what’s wrong for the patient.We have to bring health care back to that and have to focus on what’s good for patients and not necessarily what’s good for us.”