I Left the Insurance System and Opened a Cash-Only Clinic in Upland
Before I went to medical school, I worked at Amazon. That is usually the part of my story people find strange. A chemistry degree from UCSD, then a warehouse-and-logistics company, then osteopathic medical school at Touro, then residency at Harbor-UCLA. It looks like a detour. It wasn't. The years I spent at Amazon are the reason my new practice — Phil Zhou Medical in Upland (in between Los Angeles and San Bernardino)— looks the way it does. At Amazon, the entire company was organized around a single question: where is the friction, and how do we delete it? Not "how do we explain the friction to the customer." Not "how do we build a department that manages the friction." Delete it. Every extra click, every phone tree, every day of shipping delay was treated as a defect to be engineered out of existence. Then I went into medicine, and I found an industry that had gone the opposite direction for forty years straight. What the friction actually looks like You hav...