Management & Leadership November 5, 2009, 5:00PM EST

The Return of the House Call

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Because home visits typically last up to an hour, compared with the 10 minutes most Americans are lucky to get at the doctor's office, studies show that physicians are better able to identify the underlying causes of a complaint and target which family members may be at risk. The doctors also serve as ambassadors to Microsoft's health plan, often signing patients up with a primary-care doctor on the spot.

What's more, house calls are playing an important role in health emergencies. Far better, Microsoft figures, to treat people for swine flu in their own homes than have them travel to the workplace, a hospital, or a doctor's office and infect others. "This isn't just a good benefit, it's an incredible benefit," says Microsoft attorney Ronald Rice, whose 5-year-old son recently saw a house call doctor for swine flu. "I recommended it to three of my co-workers whose kids also had flu symptoms."

The Carena doctors, who recently began making house calls to employees of Seattle-based Drugstore.com, have portable labs in their cars. That means they can turn a kitchen counter into a mini-clinic, capable of doing anything—strep throat culture, stress test—that can be done in a doctor's office. Christine Bennett, a Microsoft senior content manager, recently woke up in the middle of the night and discovered that her eyes had swollen shut. "I would have had to take my two kids and my husband, our whole family, to the ER," she says. Her husband called the help line. Within half an hour a doctor was at Bennett's side, diagnosing an eye infection and handing her an antibiotic. Says Bennett: "We were all back to sleep within two hours."

Private insurers, hospitals, and the Medicare program have all experimented with house calls for the elderly and chronically ill. The Independence at Home Act pending before Congress would increase the use of house calls for Medicare beneficiaries. Microsoft's Sheehy has also been inundated with requests from other companies who want to learn more. Says Sheehy: "It's kind of an old-fashioned idea, so people sometimes find it hard to grasp that it could be the way of the future."

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Pity the Doctors

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention last month advised employers to do away with requirements that workers who have experienced flu-like symptoms provide a doctor's note prior to returning to the workplace. The CDC claims such policies are a burden on physicians who are already overwhelmed by the H1N1 flu pandemic.

To view the CDC guidance, go to bx.businessweek.com/swine-flu/reference/

Conlin is the editor of the Working Life Dept. at BusinessWeek.