What is Direct Primary Care?
DPC
Traditional FFS versus DPC
Patient Relationship
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Insurance Reimbursement
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Physician Autonomy
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Administrative Burden
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Time With Patients
Fee-For-Service
Fragmented and transactional
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Paid per visit or code; incentivizes quantity
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Care dictated by insurers and productivity metrics
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​Hours daily spent on documentation, coding, and billing
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Minimized, driven by volume targets
Direct Primary Care
Personal, trust-based as incentives align
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No insurance, instead predictable membership income; incentivizes quality
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Physician controls care decisions and schedule
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Focus on care, not compliance
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Maximized, driven by clinical and patient need
As is true for all physician practices, DPC is best practiced by physicians who embrace their profession to care for the health of their patients.
DPC is for Physicians.
DPC should be available to any and all patients, not just those who can afford a full monthly membership or who only need “simple” care. Toward that end, we at CCH Partners encourage and equip physicians to take creative measures to offer care to those who need it, in ways that fit the physician’s vocation and the needs of their community.
DPC is for Patients.
What DPC Is And Is Not
As mentioned on our home page, Direct Primary Care (DPC) is a structure for primary care in which the patient-physician relationship is unmediated. Patients pay a membership fee ($70-110 per month) to be part of the doctor's patient panel, which is kept at a size (typically 400-800 patients) that allows physicians to give patients the attention needed for high quality relationships and high quality medicine. For this membership fee, patients enjoy direct access to their physician, same day/next day scheduling, unhurried appointments, and access to labs and specialty work at highly discounted predisclosed rates. DPC physicians do not accept insurance. Above all, DPC allows physicians and patients to develop real relationships with each other and partner together in the pursuit of patients’ health.
Direct Primary Care is not concierge medicine, which provides bespoken services to smaller panels of patients by combining a membership fee typically 2-10x higher than that of DPC with insurance reimbursement. DPC is concierge-quality care that preserves the integrity of the patient-physician relationship through affordable billing.
Why DPC?
By relating to their patients directly, DPC physicians are freed to spend more than twice as much time with their patients as physicians in typical fee-for-service (FFS) practices, and to focus that time on what is of genuine value rather than on compliance with the demands of a broken system. DPC physicians are freed from perverse incentives to perform superfluous testing, prescribe high-margin treatments, dismiss patients’ concerns for the sake of time, or push treatments the physician does not believe fit their patients’ needs. The panel size allows DPC physicians to genuinely get to know their patients and to accompany them through sickness and health, creatively partnering in ways that fit both the physician’s profession and the patient’s vocation.
The model also offers freedom for DPC physicians to find creative ways to care for those who cannot afford a full membership (FFS clinics, on the other hand, are not permitted to provide pro bono care if they participate in Medicare or Medicaid). In these and other ways, DPC supports the fiduciary relationship between primary care physician and patient by freeing both from disruptive third party influences. In so doing, the DPC model creates a space in which primary care physicians can practice good medicine for the good of their patients.