Why Direct Primary Care?

Why would you pay for a monthly membership to see your family doctor?  It’s a valid question especially if you already have medical insurance.  Direct primary care is a model in which patients will do just that.  Some of these patients have great insurance, others have none.  The reason this model has gained in popularity over the years is because our traditional system doesn’t work well for most people.

Are you able to call your primary care doctor and see them the same day or next day?  If you do get into the office, do you see your doctor or a covering doctor/nurse practitioner or physician assistant?  Will you have to wait for 30-45 minutes to be seen?  If you can’t get in do you go to urgent care? 

The reality is that for most people the answer to these questions are not the answers they are looking for in their healthcare.  Having health insurance doesn’t equal access and doesn’t equal personalized and attentive care.  The reason for this is because insurance companies are the customer not the patient.  Doctors must have patients come into the office for everything in order to be compensated for taking care of them.  This requires doctors to keep their schedules very full to meet the required goals they need to get paid.  What results is more difficult access and compressed visits making it tougher to manage all of a patients’ needs.   Doctors then must refer more problems to specialists due to these time constraints.  Sound familiar? 

I was in this model and it wasn’t working for my patients or for me.  I wanted to be able to give every patient the time they needed in an accessible and convenient way.  To make this possible I needed to break away from the constraints of an insurance-based model.

Core Family Practice was born in the fall of 2016 and has changed primary care for me and our patients.  The monthly membership model frees us from needing insurance company reimbursements, so we can have smaller patient panel sizes.  This allows us to always be available same day or next day and to have longer appointment times.  Our visits range from 30-60 minutes so we can give patients the time they need.  These longer blocks also help us stay on time so we don’t keep people waiting 30-45 minutes to be seen.  Honestly, most of the time patients don’t wait at all and they are always seen by their doctor.

One of the other great advantages of this model is we don’t necessarily need patients to come in for every issue/ailment.  We do a lot of virtual medicine via telehealth or text messaging on our secure app.  Patients love this as they can be taken care of from their desk at work or without leaving their house. 

We also think about costs.  Medical debt is the number one reason for bankruptcy in America.  Direct primary care allows patients and businesses to contain their cost and with our in-house lab and pharmacy save significantly on some costs.  More on this in another post. 

Please reach out to Core Family Practice by clicking here if you would like to learn more about our innovative approach to healthcare.