Dr. Jordan Schlein, founder of Private Medicine.
Credit: Jordan Schlein
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC's Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide for the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future issues, straight to your inbox.
When people ask Dr. Jordan Schlein to describe his medical practice, he simply says, “It's a family office for your health.”
“The goal of family offices is usually wealth preservation,” he said. “Our goal is to keep you healthy. After age 24, you are a diminishing health asset. So we aim to reduce the slope of the curve for as long as possible.”
As frustrating as that may seem to patients, Schlein's strategy is paying off as a business model. His company, Private Medical, is at the forefront of a new type of healthcare for the ultra-rich that has taken concierge medicine to a whole new level. Rather than simply offering on-call doctors and quicker visits, Private Medical has pioneered a comprehensive, highly personalized service much like more sophisticated family investment offices.
Like family offices, Private Medical has an in-house team to manage the entire family's health profile – from fitness and diet tracking to longevity research, surgeries and medical emergencies. It now serves more than 1,000 affluent families, with offices in California – San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills – New York and Miami, with more on the way.
The private medicine team of 135 doctors, nurses, clinical staff, pharmacists and medical support specialists provides on-call service 24/7, including home and office visits when needed. Private Medical does not advertise and gets most of its business through referrals. He prefers to call patients “organs.”
Shlain declined to provide details on the price, but Private Medical's clients say it charges $40,000 annually for each adult patient and $25,000 for each patient under the age of 18. The annual fee covers the cost of visits, tests and procedures in the office, but not the hospital.
The rise of family office-style medical practices — some of which charge up to $60,000 a year for membership — reflects the increase in wealth among families worth $100 million or more and the growing demand for highly personalized, data-driven health care from an aging population. Billionaires and millionaires.
The market for concierge and personal medical services for the wealthy is expected to grow more than 50% by 2032, reaching nearly $11 billion annually, according to Precedence Research.
Shlain says insurance companies, overburdened doctors and inflated prices have turned the health care system into what he calls a “sick care system.” Private Medical, for those who can afford it, aims to be proactive, performing frequent tests and diagnoses on patients, constantly updating them with new research and science, and obtaining detailed information about the patient's lifestyle, habits, family life and work life, Shlain said.
Shlain, whose father was an endoscopic surgeon and whose mother had a Ph.D. in psychology, he began making house calls to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in San Francisco. He got a “crash course” in high-end hospitality from top hotel concierges and realized that health care should be more like five-star hotel service than an impersonal system of long wait times and error-ridden diagnoses.
“I will know everything about you to help you make the best decisions in your life,” he said. “I am 70% doctor, 15% psychiatrist, 10% rabbi, and 1% friend.”
Shlain said the job of the private medical sector is often to protect its patients from the broader medical system. One of his patients, a 38-year-old businessman and major donor to a major hospital, was hospitalized with an intestinal obstruction. The hospital's CEO and head of surgery rushed to begin surgery. Shalin responded and recommended waiting a day or two. The patient recovered on his own while in the hospital and “was discharged without surgery,” Shlain said.
Shlain also creates personalized medical kits for patients to take with them when they travel or work. When a patient scratched his cornea while playing beach volleyball in the Bahamas, the patient was able to get his eye treated with a prescription at his medical kit instead of searching for a hospital on a nearby island.
Like most services intended for the wealthy, the main advantage of private medical services is access. Shlain has spent more than 20 years developing relationships with more than 4,000 professionals in various medical and scientific fields to connect patients with the right person for their specific needs.
With roots in Silicon Valley and many technology clients, Private Medical is also associated with biotech startups conducting cutting-edge research and exploring new treatments. Private Medical conducts due diligence on four or five new companies a month to keep up with rapidly changing science and research, Schlein said.
When one patient was diagnosed with major depression, Shlain worked with a new “precision psychiatry” group at Stanford University, which performs MRIs of the brain and uses neuroconnections (a map of nerve connections in the brain) to determine the best drug for treatment. .
“He got the right medication, and he's better now,” Shlain said.
Private Medical is also proud of its technology, which was developed in collaboration with some of Silicon Valley's top executives and entrepreneurs. Its platform helps doctors and patients easily access data and manage appointments and workflow.
Two big areas for his wealthy patients are longevity and sleep. With longevity, Shlain said there is no magic solution, diet or drug to turn back time, even for billionaires. The real goal, he said, is “to enable you to live to your full physical and mental capabilities for as long as possible with as few high-quality interactions with the health care system as possible.”
“Your good result is our income,” he said.
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