The marketplace economics of triage

Fee-for-service rewards activity, not appropriateness. A referral written is a box ticked; whether it was the right referral is somebody else's problem, months downstream. That is not a failure of individual judgement. It is what happens when the parties in a care pathway are connected by paperwork rather than by a shared system, and when no one is positioned to see, or be accountable for, the whole path.

A marketplace changes the structure. When patients, physicians, allied health providers, specialists, and health systems share one network, with common records, referral rails, and decision support, the incentive to refer appropriately stops being aspirational and becomes built in. The provider who assesses sees the same record as the specialist who might operate; the referrer sees the outcome; the health system sees the aggregate.

That shared visibility is what lets triage scale. It is also what makes the economics work for every side at once: the patient gets a faster, more accurate answer, the provider gets a flow of appropriate cases, the specialist gets a cleaner wait-list, and the health system gets measurable movement on a number it is held accountable for.

This piece is the longer argument behind that claim, including how the platform prices and routes care, and why a two-sided booking tool would not have produced the same result.