FAQ

We believe that the core ethical question by which to judge models of care is whether they serve the fiduciary relationship between physician and patient. Insofar as a model serves this relationship, it is ethical, and vice versa. Direct primary care serves the patient-physician relationship much better than the FFS model. In this way it is ethically superior. In order to preserve this relationship in DPC, however, physicians must commit to making their care accessible to their patients. This means pricing their memberships affordably (not cheaply) and finding creative means to care for patients who cannot afford the full membership cost. At CCH Partners, we want to partner with physicians who have this vision of just medicine.

Note: A more robust resource discussing ethical considerations in DPC is available upon request. This resource addresses the concern that physicians joining DPC are “leaving their FFS colleagues in the lurch.”

Launching a DPC clinic can take a few months or many years. Much of this depends on who you choose to partner with to help you launch, how established you want your brick and mortar to be before you launch, how you navigate your non-compete clause, how long you have practiced medicine in your region, and how seasoned you are as a physician. We’d love to connect with you to help you think more about the timing of your journey to just medicine.

Again, this varies widely. Starting a DPC clinic can require no debt financing or north of $100k of debt financing depending on your cost of living, savings, access to seed capital from friends and family, risk tolerance, target brick and mortar size, day-one panel size, timeline to scale to a full panel, etc. We are not personal financial advisors, but we’d love to connect with you to help you understand the finances of DPC clinics.

Yes, the dreaded non-compete. As you might suspect, there is no one-size-fits-all in how to deal with non-compete clauses. Thankfully, non-compete clauses are coming under scrutiny from policy-makers and the courts. It seems like these clauses will have less and less force in coming years. Regardless, they exist today. We are not legal experts, but we have connected with legal experts in the area of non-compete litigation to develop a general framework for navigating non-competes. Nothing replaces having a personal lawyer experienced in non-competes, however. We would love to connect with you to share our research in this area and help connect you to those who can provide targeted legal advice on your specific non-compete clause.