Take a minute and think about what your ideal healthcare experience entails. For many patients, they think of an office that is calm, organized, and professional—a place where the staff is helpful, caring, and knows patients by name. When patients see a physician, they envision someone who is on-time, attentive, and knowledgeable.

Now, imagine your last trip to the doctor’s office. If your real-life experiences are miles apart from your ideal, you are not alone. In a recent survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers, 71 percent of those surveyed reported facing "major frustrations" through their experiences with healthcare providers.

How Healthcare Has Changed

Healthcare delivery has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Financial, regulatory, and political forces have transformed the healthcare system into the one we know today. Changes that most often come at the patient’s expense, leaving us with a system that prioritizes profits over people.

There has been a shift away from small community-based practices to large health care institutions. Many physicians have found it challenging to financially sustain independent practices, insurance companies reduce payments to smaller independent groups, and smaller groups have traditionally been unwilling or unable to integrate new technology and treatments to stay in practice. As a result, the number of private practices has reduced as physicians retire, and large corporate groups hire most new graduate physicians. This change has made patients and physicians alike feel as though they are just a number.

With the expansion of large medical institutions, patients and medical providers are now exposed to abundant bureaucracy and red tape. The transition to a more corporate culture has resulted in countless departments, administrators, paperwork, and processes to deal with. Just getting an answer to a question can be an arduous task requiring persistence and luck.

The days of patients interacting with consistent staff are now rare. Staff turnover is high, not only with clinic staff but also with providers. Pressure has been placed on providers to see more patients per day in a smaller amount of time with fewer resources. Documentation has become more involved with providers spending most of a clinic visit in front of a computer screen. Like patients, many providers seek the same idealist care models but cannot find a practice that fits their desired goals of caring for patients.

What has resulted is a system where profits have been prioritized over patients. Ultimately the current standard does little to advocate for patients. At Excel Pain and Spine, every decision made since the foundation of the company has been to provide quality care above all else.

There is a Better Way

We are a privately-run practice owned and operated solely by physicians. The inspiration to start the practice came from the same frustration our patients were having. We realized that the only way to provide the top level of quality we strived for was to do it in a private practice-based setting.

For a long time, the latest cutting-edge treatments were marketed to only be available at a few large healthcare institutions such as Harvard or John Hopkins. This is no longer the case. Our providers have trained, taught, and conducted research at the country’s top pain medicine institutions. These experiences have proven invaluable. The providers are regarded as experts within the field of pain management and interventional spine care who continually integrate new treatments into the Excel Pain and Spine practice. Additionally, our providers teach new and advanced treatments to practicing physicians, residents, medical students, and fellows across the county.

The Excel Pain and Spine promise is to provide a unique experience not available in the Tampa Bay Area. Excel Pain and Spine combines the latest treatments traditionally only available at large medical institutions (such as Harvard, MD Anderson, John Hopkins, Wake Forest, etc.). However, we at Excel Pain and Spine provide this level of care in a personal setting within our locale that we call home.