The doctor seemed to enjoy describing the state of the industry to Cæ as well as the problem that led to a great undersupply of cardio-healer surgeons. Her points were concise and brief, while her communication was excellent, allowing him to digest the details much easily than he would otherwise.
"The biggest issue is that even if one percent of the healing surgery involves tissue deeper than that of the outer layer, the healing surgery is instantly deemed to require a senior cardio-healer surgeon," she explained. "This harsh criterion makes it such that the supply of patients needing healing surgeries greatly exceeds the supply of healing surgeries. Senior healers must personally deal with each and every one of these issues, and the number of cases is always far greater than the number of healing surgeries."
These crucial, harsh criteria and barriers to entry were the largest reasons that the number of cardio healing surgeries was so deficient relative to the number of people who needed them.
"From my personal experience as a cardiologist," she heaved a sigh. "One of my greatest issues is finding a heart healer who has the necessary qualifications to handle these kinds of surgeries. This makes it extremely difficult to schedule surgeries and increases my workload as a doctor who needs to handle this."
Cæ nodded with an engrossed expression. "What is the wait period like, Doctor?"
"A month on average," she heaved a tired sigh. "Sometimes it can take even longer if the problem is even more complicated, requiring multiple months to get a qualified heart healer. Most of the time, heart healer surgeons ' time goes into dealing with urgencies, making less pressing patients have to wait months on end to get a healing surgery. This is an issue with not just hearts, but also brain healing, and a few other areas that require great skill for a healer to operate magic on."
Cæ's eyebrows furrowed. "Is the barrier to entry truly that high? That even experienced apprentice mages are simply unqualified to deal with this?"
"There is no way around it," she replied with a certain tone. "The fact of the matter is that magic is an extremely powerful force and phenomenon. This is especially true against non-mages. A healer mage truly has the life of the patient in their hands. Healing magic, after all, alters the causality of a patient to heal them. It intervenes in the very fabric of reality itself. If used appropriately, it can be used to heal, but a single mistake either in the magic or in the decision-making process will usually mean death for the patient."
Cæ heaved a deep breath.
He couldn't argue with that.
"What about an upskilling program that helps apprentice mages learn to master how to handle deeper tissue?"
She shook her head. "We have something like this already. It's called becoming a senior mage. Only the heightened eidos capacity and the greater mana-motive force allow the senior mages to cast additional spells that would allow them to prevent disasters from happening.
Cæ raised an eyebrow. "What about having multiple apprentices focus on one healing surgery and divide the labor then?"
She shook her head once more. "That has been attempted many times and has been ruled as impossible. It's a skill issue. Skill cannot be divided; labor can. Multiple apprentices' magical capacity would have to be pooled into one person for such a thing to even be possible."
Cæ fell into silence as he pondered the matter deeply.
It wasn't a problem with an easy solution like he hoped.
"What percentage of senior-level healing surgeries are of the kind you mentioned earlier?" Cæ asked, still in thought. "The kind where, because of only a minute but crucial part of the heart healing surgery being deeper than the outer layer of the tissue, it was designated a senior-level healing surgery?"
"Most, unfortunately," she heaved a sigh. "This is the biggest issue that causes there to be more patients who need senior-level healers than anywhere near the existing number of senior-level mages. Healing surgeries are a sector where the demand for senior healers greatly exceeds the supply and where apprentice healers are simply unable to handle the healing surgeons."
This was an interesting point.
In general, most magical sectors had apprentices doing the bulk of the low-level jobs. Apprentice mages were the most accessible class of mages and interacted with the majority of the magic consumer market, comprised of citizens of the inner city, generally not poor, who had enough disposable income to make low-level commissions or purchases of magical services.
What the doctor had described, however, showed a different reality in the healing surgery sub-sector of the medical industry. This was a space where apprentices were simply not qualified to tackle as large a portion of the heart healing surgeons, overburdening senior healers, causing an acute shortage.
This caused the industry to become lopsided insofar as the market segments that healers tackled, causing great delays in heart healing surgeries to be granted.
"Can I ask you something, Mr. Cæ?"
She broke him out of his reverie, drawing his attention.
"I am curious," she leaned forward with a hint of interest. "You book an appointment with a doctor, not for a medical consult, but a strange industrial consult in the name of a potential commercial venture. What exactly do you have in mind? Do you intend to solve this problem? How do you plan to go about it?"
"I don't know yet," Cæ shook his head. "But I will figure it out eventually."
She huffed, shaking her head. "This is a foolish waste of my time. This is a problem that many people have tried to solve, but they have failed largely because it is not solvable. Not unless we increase the rate of progressions of mages by a factor of ten, allowing for ten times as many apprentice healers to become senior healers."
That was, of course, a truly impossible solution.
It was no wonder that she was pessimistic.
"Well…" she glanced at her watch. "We still have half an hour. If you have any questions, I suppose that you can ask me about it."
Cæ had no intention of wasting any of the time that he had paid for, asking her a variety of questions pertaining to the topic.
He was most curious about the structure of a heart healing surgery, especially the kind of senior-level surgery that was just barely senior-level due to the presence of a minute amount of damaged or diseased tissue that existed at a deeper level.
He wanted to understand more about the structure and process of these kinds of surgeries to better understand exactly how he could possibly handle the problem of supply. Thankfully for him, the doctor was excellent at helping him understand exactly how the process worked.
The operative sections of most healing surgeries could be divided into several phases.
The most common phase was the anesthetic induction.
While not all healing surgeries required this phase, it was generally the norm, for healing magic involved warping the body with magic, which could often be extremely painful, not to mention traumatic. A designated apprentice healer would be on the team whose sole role was to keep the patient under anesthesia.
Then came the divination phase that allowed a healer-surgeon to actually bear witness to the internal body of the patient, specifically the area to operate. It generally manifested with the help of another spell that essentially projected what the healer would see inside the body of the patient if it were an open healing surgery.
Then came the operative phase, which could be divided into multiple sub-phases that depended on the surgery, either by a chronology of events that necessarily had to be in order, or a variety of tasks that needed to be concluded, usually saving the most difficult phase for the last.
And it was in this phase that lay the portion of the surgery, however minute, that involved tissue that was too deep, too sensitive, and too risky, which made the entire surgery senior-level.
It didn't matter if the tissue was as little as one milligram or even less; that instantly classified the surgery as a senior-level surgery, even if ninety-nine percent of the surgery was apprentice-level.
"And so, senior-level healers often waste a lot of their time dealing with surgeries that are largely not worth their skill," she explained. "It cannot be helped, they need to see a surgeon in the end, after all. This makes the entire thing a complete drain on their time. But there is no way to fix it, unfortunately."
Her tone was candidly helpless.
And yet, Cæ had caught something.
"You said that they need to see their surgery through to the end?" Cæ raised an eyebrow. "Could you elaborate on that?"
"Well, it's standard procedure and the industry standard," she remarked with a raised eyebrow. "It's known as the personalized healthcare model, and it is a universal system that we typically follow. Patients deal with the same healer surgeons before, during, and after the magical healing surgery."
Cæ frowned as he thought back to when he was in the hospital.
Doctor Dane had indeed been the same doctor who had been assigned to him and Lilia after they had been rolled into the hospital's urgent care. With the situation of healers being as dire as it was, he was starting to understand more why there was no chance for them ever having gotten even an apprentice healer, let alone a senior healer.
"This personalized model of healthcare is most optimal because it increases continuity of care," she explained more thoroughly. "It leads to more informed decision-making. Improved patient outcomes. Enhanced communication and trust. Better postoperative care. And it minimizes delays. It is objectively the most superior model of healthcare to have surgeons be with patients from start to finish in the personalized healthcare mode—"
"Is it?"
Cæ's tone was profound.
His eyes lit up.
They lit up as a powerful idea appeared in his mind.
She frowned at him, adjusting her spectacles as she frowned at him. "What do you mean, Mr. Cæ? Of course it is. Countless studies show that it provides the best medical outcome for the patients. It is the most effective healer-patient relationshi—"
"No."
Cæ's tone grew more certain as his expression grew more engrossed in his own thoughts.
"No…?" she tilted her head. "Excuse me?"
"I think…" A faint murmur escaped him. "I think I figured it out."
She scoffed at his words. "You joke, mister. Many industry experts have tried their best to increase the supply of senior healers to lower demand, but none of them have succeeded. There is simply no solution that can fix this problem—"
"You're wrong."
Cæ's tone was certain.
His body language has changed.
His stormy gray eyes lit up with clarity and excitement.
His expression grew more certain and confident by the second.
CLACK
He got up from his chair, directing a grateful look at Doctor Mirae with an amicable nod. "Thank you."
"Hey, wait—"
CLACK
He closed the door behind her, immediately rushing to the exit and taking to the air after regaining his wand and exiting the interference field of the hospital.
WHOOSH!
He immediately surged towards the Elendir Institute of Magic, eager to return to the Elendir Institute of Magic to research the idea he had and flesh it out. He desperately wanted to do deeper research into the matter to figure out if the idea he had was truly viable or not.
His solution was simple in concept, but difficult to implement.
"Leveled division of labor."
Instead of having senior healers waste time in spending lengthy periods of time with one patient at a time, what if they could distil their work to the most essential portions where their skill as a senior healer was needed?
What if he could have them dedicate all their time to focusing exclusively on the parts of a healing surgery that only they could handle?
In his mind, he almost had a childish image of a senior healer teleporting from surgery room to surgery room to surgery room in rapid succession as they successfully dealt with the senior-level bits of heart healing surgeries in rapid succession.
In his rich imagination, they would be able to handle hundreds of surgeries each day, focusing only on the senior-level parts of that surgery before immediately moving on to the next part. The remaining incomplete parts of the surgery could be left to the rest of the team, comprising apprentice healers.
Of course, he was not blind to the fact that teleportation magic, a highly advanced form of space-time magic, could not be applied for such trivial purposes. Coordinating hundreds of healing surgeries across hundreds of operating rooms and hospitals to synchronize their surgeries perfectly for rapid succession teleportations was also pragmatically impossible.
"However, the principle works."
It didn't have to be teleportation.
It didn't have to be hundreds.
If he could even do ten rapid-fire surgeries in a facility that was specifically designed to allow for rapid and swift transition between adjacent and connected operating rooms, then it would be possible to multiply the productivity of senior healers by a factor of ten!
"This is it!" Cæ realized as his eyes lit up with deep vigor. "This is the answer!"