Patient Advocacy with Graith Care - Priscilla Romans

This video provides an in-depth exploration of patient advocacy through a conversation with Priscilla Romans, CEO and Founder of Graith Care. Romans discusses the origin story of her independent patient advocacy firm, detailing her personal and professional journey from a nursing background and entrepreneurial family to identifying critical gaps in the healthcare system. The core purpose of Graith Care is to empower patients by providing transparency, control, and comprehensive options for their healthcare decisions, ultimately aiming to improve outcomes, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. The discussion highlights the systemic challenges within the current healthcare model, where patients often feel disempowered, uninformed, and constrained by institutional policies and financial incentives.

Romans elaborates on the practical application of patient advocacy, explaining how Graith Care operates as an independent entity, free from hospital or insurance company affiliations, to solely serve the patient's best interest. She describes the process of clients engaging with Graith Care, from initial contact to being matched with one of their 20+ specialized advocates who possess diverse backgrounds in critical care, insurance, naturopathy, and therapy. A significant portion of the conversation focuses on real-world scenarios, including complex hospital cases where patients' primary ailments are overlooked due to COVID-19 protocols and incentives, and situations where patients seek alternative or complementary treatments not offered by their primary care providers. Graith Care acts as a "second set of eyes," helping families navigate medical decisions, plan discharges, and even facilitate critical patient transfers between facilities when standard care pathways are insufficient or undesired by the patient.

The discussion also delves into the future of patient advocacy, emphasizing the growing need for a collaborative approach that integrates allopathic (conventional) medicine with alternative and holistic treatment options. Romans advocates for a shift in mindset within the healthcare industry, urging for greater recognition and coverage of complementary therapies, such as high-dose IV ascorbic acid for cancer patients, which are often dismissed despite being relatively inexpensive and potentially beneficial. She attributes the bias against such treatments to doctors' limited training in nutrition and holistic approaches, coupled with the systemic pressures of short patient visit times and productivity scores. Romans passionately argues for a return to patient-centered care, where informed consent and individual choice are paramount, and where collaboration between all healthcare stakeholders—from physicians to nurses and advocates—prioritizes the patient's well-being over institutional constraints.

Key Takeaways:

• Empowering Patient Control and Transparency: Graith Care's mission is to restore control and transparency to healthcare consumers, ensuring patients are fully informed of all options to make the best decisions for their unique situations. This counters the common feeling of disempowerment within the complex healthcare system.
• Independent Advocacy Model: Graith Care operates independently of hospitals and insurance companies, allowing advocates to provide unbiased advice and recommendations. This independence removes the "blinders of policies and procedures" that often constrain institutional providers.
• Diverse Advocacy Services: The firm offers over 40 types of advocacy services, ranging from navigating insurance claims and appeals to finding transplant advocates, exploring holistic alternatives, and managing pediatric to adult care needs. This breadth addresses the multifaceted challenges patients face.
• Addressing Systemic Gaps in Care: The video highlights critical gaps, such as the neglect of primary medical issues due to hospital incentives for specific protocols (e.g., COVID-19), and the lack of comprehensive discharge planning, which contributes to high readmission rates.
• Facilitating Patient Transfers: Graith Care assists patients in transferring to facilities that offer desired treatments or protocols not available at their current hospital. This often involves complex logistics, collaboration with physicians, and sometimes legal pressure to ensure patient choice is honored.
• Challenging the Allopathic-Only Mindset: Romans advocates for integrating complementary and alternative treatment options alongside conventional medicine, citing examples like high-dose IV ascorbic acid for cancer patients. She emphasizes that these are not "fufu" but scientifically supported options that should be covered by insurance.
• Physician Constraints and Bias: Doctors often lack comprehensive training in nutrition and holistic treatments, and are constrained by short appointment times (e.g., 15 minutes) and productivity metrics. This systemic pressure limits their ability to discuss broader treatment options or engage in deeper patient-physician relationships.
• Proactive vs. Reactive Healthcare: Graith Care emphasizes proactive planning to prevent health crises, arguing that it is more cost-effective and leads to better outcomes than reacting to problems. This approach aims to keep individuals out of the "hands of crisis" where bad decisions are often made.
• Importance of a Collaborative Network: The success of Graith Care relies on a strong network of diverse professionals, including nurses, insurance experts, naturopaths, physical therapists, and occupational therapists, who can collectively address the wide range of patient needs.
• Transparency in Pricing and Services: Graith Care maintains transparent pricing and FAQs online, and commits to quick follow-up, especially for critical hospital cases, demonstrating a commitment to accessibility and responsiveness.
• The "Molly and Jim" Case Study: This example illustrates the challenges of patient choice in a high-tier hospital where a doctor refused to consider alternative treatments or transfer, highlighting the need for external advocacy to ensure patient options are presented and pursued.
• Impact of Information Suppression: The speaker's experience with a viral TikTok video promoting cash price negotiations being taken down suggests a broader issue of information suppression regarding patient empowerment and alternative healthcare options.

Key Concepts:

• Patient Advocacy: The act of supporting and representing patients to ensure their rights, wishes, and needs are met within the healthcare system, especially when they are unable to do so themselves.
• Informed Consent: The ethical and legal requirement that patients understand the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a proposed medical procedure or treatment before agreeing to it.
• Independent Advocacy: Advocacy services provided by an entity not affiliated with hospitals, insurance companies, or other healthcare providers, ensuring unbiased representation of the patient's interests.
• Allopathic Medicine: The conventional Western medical system that treats diseases with drugs, surgery, or radiation.
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM): A group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not generally considered part of conventional medicine. "Complementary" means used together with conventional medicine; "alternative" means used in place of conventional medicine.
• Cash Price Negotiations: The practice of patients asking for and negotiating the direct cost of medical services or pharmaceuticals, often bypassing insurance, which can sometimes lead to lower prices.

Examples/Case Studies:

• COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Patients admitted for primary issues (e.g., colitis) being diagnosed with COVID-19 via PCR tests, leading to neglect of their original ailment due to hospital incentives for COVID protocols. Graith Care helps families redirect focus to the primary issue and immune support.
• Patient Transfers for Alternative Treatments: Cases where patients in critical care (e.g., with COVID-19) desire specific "Frontline doctors protocols" (e.g., IV ascorbic acid, Ivermectin) not offered by their hospital. Graith Care facilitates transfers to facilities willing to provide these options, involving complex logistics like air ambulances.
• "Molly and Jim" Story: A patient in a high-tier South Dakota hospital whose doctor refused to offer or facilitate alternative treatments or a transfer. Graith Care intervened, navigating institutional resistance to successfully transfer the patient, emphasizing the patient's right to choose.
• Cancer Treatment Alternatives: Discussion of cancer patients seeking to combine conventional treatments (chemo, radiation) with complementary options like high-dose IV ascorbic acid for immune support, highlighting the need for oncologists to be open to these alternatives.