CARDIOGENIX MEDICAL CENTRE IS AFFORDABLE PRIVATE HEALTH CARE ALTERNATIVE
Years ago, when he was treating heart attack and stroke patients at three Montreal-area emergency rooms, Dr. Ashok Oommen began worrying that Quebec’s public health care system wasn’t preventive enough. Worse still, Oommen noticed that heart attack victims were also getting younger.
“I did full-time emergency medicine for about 15 years and during that time, I realized that some patients’ life-threatening illnesses could have been avoided,” Oommen said. “If we had caught them 10 years earlier — if these patients had had a family doctor, and if we talked to them about smoking, cholesterol, exercise, diet and looked at their family history and monitored their stress — they wouldn’t need to be in that emergency room, clinging to life.”
Oommen would ask his patients if they had a family doctor, and half of them would say no.
He believes preventive health care was dealt a further blow on June 1, 2016, when Quebec “removed annual checkups from the public system. Doctors cannot bill for it, and the government will not pay for it because preventive elements are being removed from medicare practices.”
These cracks in the system are part of the reason Oommen cofounded the private Cardiogenix Medical Centre in 2006. Today, drawing on his expertise in family and emergency medicine, Oommen leads a specialized staff of doctors, nurses, therapists, and dieticians at Cardiogenix to offer patients medical services to help prevent many leading causes of death, such as cancer, stroke, heart disease and diabetes.
“We built our niche on preventive medicine, but we also provide traditional family medicine services, at a different level, with state-of-the-art diagnostics: sore throats, pneumonia, ankle sprains, fractures, cholesterol, diabetes; that is still our bread and butter,” said Oommen, adding that Cardiogenix also does minor surgeries like lacerations, draining abscesses, cortisone injections for the knee, and so forth.
What really distinguishes Cardiogenix from other clinics and medical centres is how patients are helped to attain optimal health. For some, that means correcting nagging symptoms that were untreated or dismissed. For others, that means getting help to change a lifestyle that is unnecessarily cutting off years from life. It’s about the extra time their doctors take to listen and talk things through, for as long as it takes. Each patient is treated like a valued individual, and leaves grateful for having received exactly the care they needed.
That attentive personalized care and comprehensive medical checkups were what drew Montreal business analyst and musician Carlos Bichai to Cardiogenix.
“I didn’t have a family doctor; I felt like I was just a number in the public system, and when you do get an appointment, you sit around for hours with 40 other people in the same waiting room,” said Bichai, a 43-year-old married father with two children. “Then when you see the doctor, they don’t take the time to give you personalized service. They send you here for this test and send you there for that test, don’t ask how you’ve been taking care of your health the past six months.”
Over at Cardiogenix, Bichai explained, “you feel like a member of the family when you walk in. At that point I was willing to pay for good service because I didn’t have a family doctor and I couldn’t find the quality of service that I had when I was a kid. I remember when I had a fever, the doctor would even come to my house! I miss that service. What we were used to when we were kids, versus what we have now, I decided was worth paying for.”
Oommen acknowledges that some people think private health care is expensive and geared toward the wealthy, celebrities, and politicians.
“When we started, it is true that we saw upper-middle-class patients and above,” Oommen said. “Then as word got out, the demographics shifted. This year we have 50-50 male-female patients, all age groups, and we are also seeing a great number of students who are paying less (for Cardiogenix services) than for their cellphone.”
Cardiogenix offers three medical centres under one roof at their Decarie Boulevard location that is a short walk from De la Savane Métro station.
Cardiogenix Premium is the “flagship state-of-the art division,” where physicians and a team of medical professionals are available to patients around the clock.
The Cardiogenix Specialists division is a Medicare-based practice staffed with experienced medical specialists.
Then, there is Cardiogenix QA, which, according to Oommen, is their “more affordable private division, built on a pay-as-you-go model. If you budget for about $90 a month, you will see your family doctor regularly over the course of the year, and you will be seen in a very timely fashion.”
This is music to the ears of patients like Bichai.
“At first I was concerned that private health care might be out of my price range,” he said. “So I called Cardiogenix, I met Dr. Oommen, and it was everything I had hoped for. When I asked about prices, they explained all of their options to me. I am a Cardiogenix member, and I am so pleased with their holistic approach to health care that I want to get my wife and children memberships too. It’s accessible quality service and it offers me peace of mind. That kind of accessibility is priceless.”
For more information, visit cardiogenix.com.