The path to owning your own medical practice typically runs through more than a decade of schooling, grinding through medical school, residency and years of specialty training. Unless you're Rick Crews. "I knew next to nothing about health care," says the proud owner of four urgent care clinics in Massachusetts. The former UBS financial advisor isn't a board-certified physician-he's a franchisee, one of hundreds who, along with some of the biggest private equity and venture capital firms, are betting that they can use the retail lessons of McDonald's to turn the health care world upside down. And in their quest to make M.D.s wielding stethoscopes as accessible as baristas at Starbucks, they just might rescue America from its looming health care catastrophe.
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