House Calls? Ask any elder and he or she will likely describe to you the days in his or her youth when it was highly common for the family doctor to make regular visits to their house. Whether the patient was sick, hurt, or just in need of a simple physical check-up, the doctor would, medical supply case in hand, travel directly to the patient’s house and care for him or her.

As the years passed, the standard medical house call industry faded as more and more doctor’s offices and hospital medical centers were built. Somehow, it became more popular for people–sick, hurt, elderly–to travel outside of their homes to visit the doctor. Even as mothers dreaded to take their feverish young children out into the cold to get into the car for the doctor’s office, and elderly, handicapped people became squeamish at the thought of having to ride in the car – the patient visiting the doctor remained more popular than the doctor visiting the patient.

Today, medical house call practices appeal to patients who are too sick or fatigued to drive to the doctor’s office, or patients who fear getting sick while sitting in a waiting room full of germs, or patients who don’t want to waste precious gas money or face the traffic that ensues while driving to the doctor’s office.

The medical house call practices of today will commonly see patients for most kinds of medical problems, but may exclude those that are potentially life-threatening, such as chest pain, shortness of breath, loss of consciousness, serious trauma, or severe problems with a pregnancy. In these cases, patients are advised to head to the hospital for emergency care treatment.

Thankfully, the industry is changing, and society is increasingly accepting of the mobile medical practice – or house call doctor. The “revival of the house call” is duly noted in several media publications, with Medicare having been billed about $1.5 million annually for house calls in the past few years alone.