Direct primary care is not concierge medicine. For an affordable monthly fee we provide all of your primary care needs that can be done in the office including same day and next day visits, yearly physical exams, discounted labs and medications and you can contact us by text, email or phone call day or night. We do not bill your insurance company and there is no co-payment. We are taking the practice of medicine back to where it supposed to be.
We discussed the benefits of direct primary care for the individuals that become part of our healthcare team. However, if you are a small business owner (or even a big business owner) are you aware that direct primary care could be saving you thousands of dollars each year?
We all get sick, and let’s face it, we all get hurt from time to time. Doctor’s offices are typically booked out for weeks, especially during cold season. Where does this leave you? Well, the ER, of course. The example you’ll read below is an actual patient encounter related to a work place injury and how it was managed, right here in our office.
A patient’s wife calls and states that her husband cut his finger at work and thinks he needs stitches. We told her to bring him right over. In the office he was found to have a complicated crush injury and laceration to the tip of one of his fingers. This was a great teaching moment for my third year medical student and my nurse practitioner. After we numbed up and cleansed his wound we drilled a hole through his nail to sew the tip of his finger in place, eight stitches in all.
The beauty of direct primary care is we have same day visits like this even for things that take a little more time. We don’t bill the insurance companies for what we do so there are no co-payments. Instead our patients pay us a relatively low monthly fee to provide all of their primary care and most of their urgent care such as sewing up a cut finger.
This patient is employed by a major Boston corporation and if he had gone to an emergency room he would have incurred thousands of dollars of bills to his employers workmen compensation carrier. He definitely would have gotten an unnecessary x-ray and would’ve gotten an unnecessary tetanus shot which was done three years ago, because the emergency rooms are too busy to call for this information. He likely would have been waiting for hours to be seen and treated. Instead he called, came right over and was treated. I had the opportunity to teach my student and nurse practitioner some stitching techniques which we also had time to discuss later. This is all added value of direct primary care and every day I find more joy in the decision to transition to it a year ago.
Dr. Mike
