Direct Primary Care: Reducing Malpractice Risks

In this episode, you'll hear from Dr. Robert Pope and Dr. Neal Douglas as they discuss the critical issue of malpractice for independent Direct Primary Care (DPC) physicians.

Dr. Pope recounts his journey through internal medicine, administrative roles at major insurance companies, and his contributions to creating CARE as a malpractice insurance solution. He discusses the evolution of the hospitalist movement, the importance of continuity of care, and the impact of effective, high-quality doctor-patient relationships in reducing litigation risks. 

Dr. Douglas highlights not only the advantages of the DPC model, such as personalized care and reduced bureaucracy, he also shares his successful experience partnering with CARE for his own DPC malpractice policy, largely driven by the fact that CARE not only understands and believes in the DPC movement and the high quality of care that DPC physicians brings to patients, but that it backs that up with tailored, more affordable and robust malpractice plans for DPC doctors.

CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR MALPRACTICE QUOTE FROM CARE TODAY.

Transcript

Dr. Maryal Concepcion: 0:05

Primary care is an innovative, alternative path to insurance driven health care. Typically, a patient pays their doctor a low monthly membership and in return, builds a lasting relationship with their doctor and has their doctor available at their fingertips. Welcome to the My DPC Story podcast, where each week, You will hear the ever so relatable stories shared by physicians who have chosen to practice medicine in their individual communities through the direct primary care model. I'm your host, Marielle Conception, family physician, DPC owner, and former fee for service doctor. I hope you enjoy today's episode and come away feeling inspired about the future of patient care, direct primary care. Thank you so much, everybody, for tuning in. This is going to be a special episode featuring Dr. Robert Pope, who you have not heard before. And Dr. Neal Douglas, who you just heard from recently on the podcast, Dr. Douglas spoke about something that is so true and is so appropriate for our conversation today, that malpractice as an independent physician entrepreneur is something that a lot of us have not faced before, because especially if we came from the employed world, malpractice was something that was just part of our contract. And we realized being physician entrepreneurs, especially in DPC, that malpractice can be one of the largest checks that we write for every month. I'd like to hand the mic over to Dr. Pope and Dr. Pope, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here today. And start us off, please, with your journey into internal medicine, and how that shifted into an insurance component to your medical career because of what you had seen as a physician.

Dr. Robert Pope: 1:48

Well, thank you for having me. sort of Going back to my beginning of my career, I did have a residency in internal medicine in a small community hospital. Thank you And that was really exciting for me because I was able to get a license and get involved in moonlighting in the emergency room. And I was able to do that in my local hospital and also started working once I got my license, was able to start working in several of the surrounding states and emergency rooms. And I liked it so much that some of the residents and interns turned to me to help them get moonlighting roles. And by the time I ended my residency, I had five emergency rooms under contract and was scrambling to get medical malpractice insurance for a lot of them. So, that was my first real foray into understanding uh, the procurement of medical malpractice and how hard it was at some points in time to be able to get it in the price points that you see in a hard market. But I did go into practice and I was in practice in internal medicine for 10 years and during that time I was involved in occupational health quite a bit. I was the company physician for American standard in Louisville. And did a lot of other things that were in the clinical space outside of the office on administrative role in after 10 years, I was involved in managed care and a local HMO there. That had 50 percent partnership with a hospital and a physician group. And that turned out to be, my first step into real, real administrative medicine. I worked my way up to a regional medical director and had 20 states with MetLife. I came back to Louisville as the chief medical officer for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And the important thing about the role of Blue Cross Blue Shield is that we had a contract there with a local physician group. In fact, it was a large physician group, and it was run by primary care physicians. And within that role, I was able to work with those physicians to develop guidelines for care, not only for primary care, but about 20 different specialties. So, it was really an exciting time. That gave me a real insight. into working with physicians and the, all the dynamics and politics of of that activity. after a couple of years, they the, the administration, the executives asked me to run a health promotion and wellness company for Blue Cross Blue Shield. So I, I rolled out of the chief medical officer role and became a president CEO of a wellness company. That delivered health promotion programs to the customers as my career went on, I moved to Atlanta and worked for United Healthcare and again, had the opportunity to work with uh, a variety of not only primary care physicians, but specialties. And as the chief medical officer there in, in Georgia ran the QA committee and some of the other activities that, uh, really tried to deliver better care for the uh, members there in in Atlanta. About that time the Institute of Medicine came out with their treaties. On patient safety in the hospital and patient safety became a big focus of ours. Some of our larger customers like Coca Cola and Delta Airlines were very involved in the community. We formed a leadership council between the, uh, medical directors in Atlanta and the large customers and really tried to focus on improving care in a variety of ways. So it's really an exciting time in the early 2000s. In Atlanta. So that's really was my I think my first focus on patient safety. I remember the medical director at Delta Airlines saying, if we have 100, 000 people that are inadvertently died in the hospitals because of the care or lack of care, it's like a 747 going down every day. We should not be ignoring that and you wouldn't ignore it if it was a plane in in our business so that really has stuck with me all these years In the mid 2000s, I moved to Humana as chief medical officer for Medicare and again, focusing on patient care, improving patient care, developing chronic care programs, disease management programs with our physicians. It was again, an exciting time to help improve Medicare population. And especially our, one of the big focuses there was readmissions. Medicare business, if you look at their data, their remission rate is over 20%, which is very high. We were able to with some good programs an intervention to drop that readmission rate down into the low teens. So, very important for quality of care. and continuity of care also, because that's generally the problem with readmissions is that you lose the continuity when the patient gets discharged, especially with hospitalists now. So, around that time about almost 21 years ago is when I had a a couple of business people came to me and another doctor and, And asked me about forming a medical malpractice company and being involved in that. So, originally I was on the, the advisory committee and it became much more formal operation as the business took off. And we or I've been the chairman. And and involved in the company over those last 21 years. So it's been an exciting time. I've seen a lot of certainly changes in how health care is delivered. And some of it's exciting. Some of it's not so exciting. I know it's been a big burden on practicing physicians. And I feel that my role was always there to help practicing physicians get through the red tape and the bureaucracy of the managed care organizations and tried to, to build relationships over that time so that they would feel free to come to me and have access to me and let me help them when their patients needed help.

Dr. Maryal Concepcion: 8:29

Wow. So much there. And I, I really pick up on one thing that you said, the dynamics and politics of it all. And I think about, especially being that you are a physician, I mean, we see so many people who are involved with Bucca on all levels who have never gone to medical school. They have never seen a patient. They don't understand what it is to work with a patient. I want to first ask about these changes that you also mentioned you noticed. I mean, how could you not notice you're in healthcare and you're a physician and in the administrative roles that you are in? How did you see the insurance world treating doctors differently as you progressed in those first 10 years?

Dr. Robert Pope: 9:11

Well, the doctors seem to be a much bigger partner with the insurance companies. The 10 years that I was in practice we actually, and again, I practiced in Kentucky for 10 years, the both the hospital association and the state, Medical association. Were on the boards of Blue Cross Blue Shield. So, that again, in those 10 years, that was the biggest insurance carrier there in that I worked with. So there was much more input from the doctors and the hospitals, both as, as their practice as their practices went on. So I think we've lost that touch that relationship that feel. As we have gone along and as, as I said, I, I tried to try to be as available as I could during that time. And I think a lot of the other medical directors, chief medical officers did, did the same thing. Maybe not all of them, but certainly a lot of them. And that, I think that's the biggest thing I know when this hospitalist movement started back in early 2000. And we were at a meeting out in San Francisco and had a resident come up to me and started talking about the old old days in Medicare and in practice and actually called it the golden years of health care. And we, we sort of had to stop and pause and say, well, what do you mean? And he said, well, things are so different now going through medicine and hospitalist programs are starting to be initiated. We have a disconnect really with the primary care physicians or those, those patients, those physicians that we turn the patients back over to. And there's just bigger gaps in health care. And I said, yes, that's. That's going to be a problem. Certainly continuity of care is, is a real issue. One thing that we did at United was develop a program, a re admission prevention program, to try to catch those patients that really needed care on a, on a continual basis after they were discharged to be sure that they would get back, had an appointment to get back with their physician, and that they had their prescriptions, they had their DME, all those things that they needed. At home that there wasn't any holdup with those things that were ordered in the hospital. So, that's I know that when I was in Atlanta hospitalists were a became a political issue because the primary care physicians, those physicians on the primary care level that were in the hospital thought that they would lose their patients. I don't think that we still are seeing good continuity of care. With that system, that's one of the biggest things I've seen in, in the changes in healthcare.

Dr. Maryal Concepcion: 12:03

And it's so interesting because, as we've gone from a country where you had your doctor, that wasn't necessarily a specialist, that was just typically your GP who did deliveries at your house, sutures, things that we're bringing back to put it lightly for the direct primary care movement, because we are practicing at the full scope of our training. I, I know exactly what you talk about it because, during family medicine residency, we had inpatient rotations and yes, we had our continuity of care patients. Sometimes we got to take care of those people when they were in the hospital, but very frequently it was whoever was on call, whoever was, able to take care of the patients based on what insurance they did or did not have. It was, we saw the, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, many of us have seen the, oh, it all ends with how fast can we get that that voucher for the person to get into a taxi and not be our problem anymore. That was the culture. And, I, it, it makes me so, it makes me so sad to think about where the quality of care was at what point, and I get it mortality rates, vaccines didn't exist okay, it was a different time. But in terms of a relationship with your doctor, that's the quality of care that I'm talking about that I'm so proud to be a part of now in this direct primary care movement. But it's so sad to think about how. We got so far away from that for a very long time with a lot of people not knowing that hanging a shingle is still a thing. How did you then look at developing a malpractice company that was relationship based, but also being mindful that, Yeah. There are so many unnecessary claims because of the insurance gaming, like we have to, put on the, the 25 modifier if we have to add the, or, you see people adding codes, when they have AI scrubbing x rays from, people. previously done x rays, there's so many ways that people get burned by the system. And so, I would love to hear your take on opening a relationship based company with all of those lessons learned from from your years in administration, as well as being a physician, that led you to start working with direct primary care physicians because we're not corporate medicine?

Dr. Robert Pope: 14:23

Well, fortunately, I had a one of the partners that I had when we started the company was a primary care physician also. He was a general practitioner. So between both of us, then we had a couple of business people that helped us on really getting it up and going from a financial standpoint. But we were central to running the company and we, we always felt that our mission was to bring a cost effective product to physicians and be there if they did have a question and certainly if a claim came in. My partner was the head of the claims committee and it was. been in practice for probably 30 years at that point and was very good at reading between the lines understanding what the case was getting back to the standard of care, which is very important in a malpractice lawsuit and talking directly with the physician about the case. And that was, that was a very integral part of our business model. And we're certainly continuing that that way of operation. But, our key point when we talk to physicians is that You are going to be the best witness, whether it's talking to us in a formal deposition, or if we ever have to go to trial, you are the best witness because you know what the critical thinking was at that point of care. And you have the empathy, the sympathy, and you have to demonstrate that to the judge or the jury. So we want you to know that you have all of our support and we'll do everything that we can to support you and get you to the best end result that we can. So that's key is keeping the physician involved in any lawsuits that we do, we do have that come up. so I was very excited to get started with DPC Primary care has been our bread and butter for 20 years and that's where DPC comes in. Not a high volume group that really worked with taking care of their patients.

Dr. Maryal Concepcion: 16:36

Thank you so much, Dr. Pope. I'm going to hand the mic over to Dr. Douglas now. And for the listeners his voice might seem familiar because his episode literally is the most recent one to have dropped on the podcast. So we're going to take what Dr. Pope said. And now talk about this idea of relationships, dr. Douglas had mentioned in his episode that he intentionally was looking for a company that was celebrating having relationships with their clients versus, having a company that was very transactional when it came to finding his own malpractice finding that, malpractice was a big expenditure for you? And Also, that direct primary care physicians, we see fewer patients per physician. How did you take those two pieces to drive your looking for an insurance company that would partner with you and have a relationship with you versus, oh yeah, you're another doctor, I get paid for every head I bring on to the company?

Dr. Neal Douglas: 17:33

Well, I think one of the things I talked in my episode about having big ideas and I'm always just kind of like a pie in the sky dreamer person. But one of the things that, one of some of the things that keep me up at night is okay, if we do have, if we fast forward 10 years on our movement and we have doctors who are taking this good of care of patients. And we all collaborate as well as we do every conference you go to. It's like showing up in your family. And I mean, we've all coached each other. We've helped each other along our journeys. We're basically a very close knit family. But the idea is, how can we leverage that? In our favor, how can we leverage that when we interface with other professional companies? Because really there's a lot of sway and a lot of power to having a group of doctors who do a really good job taking care of their patients. And I think and, but also, work together on a regular basis. And I think one of the biggest biggest leverage points that I saw an opening for would have been with, establishing a relationship with Mount practice carrier. Because if we, a lot of the early discussions in D. P. C. Is, we know we take better care of our patients. How do we measure that? How do we get data that we can use at a state level? How do we How do we actually build a case that says, yes, this works. And yes, our care is better compared to our colleagues who are stuck having to provide a bill a CPT code at the end of every single visit. One of the ways we can also get that information is by partnering with. A malpractice company that can help us to generate those reports to help us generate that information. So we know that we are indeed a lower risk model. And that I think is going to help us really advance that cause, advance the cause of direct primary care. So that was a big part of my thought process when I was looking at how do we evolve the malpractice You know, interface for direct primary care doctors down the road. That discussion yeah, I mean, it really started with off Clota Ryan, who had been working with someone who was very, very, open and understood what direct primary care involves. And that was my first thing. I had worked with several other brokers because I was tasked with kind of representing that in the direct primary care lines to, to try and find some kind of a, a partnership that we could use. But I quickly figured out that the way that worked is whatever broker we are going to be working with was going to be making money off of us every single day. every single payment and they really just kind of set up the relationship to begin with and then they're quite hands off with with that policy but they're still getting that commission and to me that is a middle man and I'm not into middlemen and you know that is like a curse word in direct primary care because that's what we do. We cut out middlemen and we go directly to our patients. That's just, That's the facts of life. So and we know that's how you drive down the price of health care. That's what you do. You take you go directly to your patients. I'm preaching to the choir here, I realize, but this is a really foreign concept for most large entities. They have no public. When you want to interface directly with them, they're like, well, that's not the way it works. That's not how we do business. That's not, we can't do that. We can't give up commissions. We can't do this and that. So when I talk to somebody who says, we believe in what you're And I can throw in As for every state possible. I can throw in my commission to lower everybody's rate because I want to build this relationship right now so that we can move going forward. So that was a big, that was exciting. I was like, wow, this is something that gets in somebody who wants to support us and just a really, yeah, that someone who I have just grown to trust over the years and, Yeah, so, so, that was, that was part of my journey. It was, I have to admit, it was far less about lowering my rate in the moment. It was much more about trying to figure out how we can leverage direct primary care. And that's something I love. to continue to explore in the future as our movement grows. How do we continue to look out for each other to create opportunities? But we have to be obviously very careful because we know we've been taken advantage of left, right, and center in our professional field, which is the reason a lot of us burned out, which is the reason a lot of us ended up at a drug primary care conference or listening to my DPC story in the first place, because guess what? We get treated like garbage. And it's really hard to interface with companies because they see us in dollar signs. They don't see us as the value that we bring to the system. So

Dr. Robert Pope: 22:33

well, I, I totally Agree with that approach and it sort of makes me laugh because usually doctors come to me and and say, you know I treat my patients much better. My costs are a lot more. I should be paid more, you know I should have a higher fee schedule. So, but with medical malpractice It's it's all in the data. Your experience is going to show your business model that you're going to have less adverse events you're going to have less malpractice cases. And subsequently your, your premiums would, should be lower than the average primary care group. So, I totally buy into that and with our, our partnership bringing you the lessons learned from our claims committee, we've got a lot of lessons that would apply and a lot of it's around communication and documentation.

Dr. Neal Douglas: 23:26

And that's why my malpractice is through care. Now I do have that personal coverage and that's who I'm using and built relationship with them. Jason and now building the right relationship with Dr. Pope and continuing to educate them. Yeah.

Dr. Maryal Concepcion: 23:39

And I think that this is so important for people to hear because especially Neil, you and I have heard this a lot that I can't do DPC because, and one of those reasons is because I can't afford malpractice. And so. I know that you have mentored lots of people knowing that you have your malpractice through care how do you talk to them about how to vet a company.

Dr. Neal Douglas: 24:05

We talk about there's like trauma that's built into the other system where really, you know, when we take a vow to do no harm to our patients. To me, that also means do no financial harm. And when we look at how the system is built against the average consumer of healthcare to do pretty significant financial harm, and we look at the way corporate medicine is generating profit margins by, in a lot of ways, making our jobs harder, you're showing up with a lot of damage. And, and, and that is very normal, just so you get, if you're feeling that way, that's, that's the way. In some ways, you're meant to feel like a cog in a wheel, and as small of a cog as possible, so you don't make waves. Welcome to DPC. You get to be as big a cog as you want, and you get to make as many waves as you would like, because guess what? You're in church. Anyway but when you're in that journey and you're in that beginning space, it's really nice to know that there are companies that we have established relationships with my relationship with care. It goes back about four years when we were on this journey to look for a company that was willing to. sit at the table and discuss what, what our level of care looks like. Number one, number two, to look at how, how can we leverage that? And then number three, in the future, how can we just continue to to build on the opportunities that we have by doing such great medicine. And it's the only company that I've had that level of discussion with is the care group. And Jason's not on right now, but I've, Jason and I met at Jason is one of the One of the main guys that care. So Jason and I, we get to talking and he totally gets it. He's one of those people, that that understands it and he believes in it. And I know because he's patient and he's been working with us and we are not quick movers and we are. stubborn, and we are, we can be a little bit feisty, and I ask really challenging questions and probing questions, and I have no apologies for that. But over those four years, we've really developed a really good relationship and an understanding of what direct primary care is, what it means, and how do we meet the needs of those people. Of those members or or the direct primary care community at large and the, I mean, the, it's been really exciting to see care, who was only I'm trying to remember how many states you guys covered before you started working with direct primary care doctors. Do you do

Dr. Robert Pope: 26:58

about 23? I mean, we have about 49 states now since you all came in the picture, but we were focused really on about 23 states. So four years

Dr. Neal Douglas: 27:08

ago. So now, I mean, for you guys to 23 states when we first started and because of direct primary care, I don't know that there's another book of business they have that's done this. I'm pretty sure it's us. We have now gotten their business. to support 49 different states. And that was our goal. How do we get every doctor in the U. S. to be able to have a similar level of coverage through care? And so, unfortunately, Oregon was like one of the last states to get added, which is fine. I was patient. But now I get to also reap the benefit. Of having care is my provider which has been great because then we can have a lot of those discussions and, immediately saving, 30 percent on your bill was great. I love that part of it, but also just to feel like. I'm involved in a company where I know who's representing me. If something happens, I could give them a call. I could say, Hey, I've got this patient situation. That's kind of challenging. How would you help me with this? And, and I'd really trust them in that way where they're. If even if you got onto their website, you can see there's not a list of 1000 faces on there. There's, they are a smaller company. As Dr Pope said, they're not there are different graded qualities of insurance that are out there. I don't know a whole lot about that, but I know that they are also in the space of yes. We are not, we don't have to follow every single rule that's out there, but because of that, we can actually provide better care and more personalized care. So they, that kind of feels like direct primary care ish to me as well. So there's a lot of yeah, there's a lot of really, I think a lot of similarities with the way I've, I've heard care is run just in the organic way and the way they're able to pivot and shift. It's been really nice to work with. And then the fact that they get it. So I'll let Dr Pope, if you could speak more to that.

Dr. Robert Pope: 29:10

Yeah, I can. As, as you said, we, we are, we're not your traditional admitted carrier and we're what's called a risk retention group. And this was developed under a law of Congress. So it's actually a federal statute that created these risk retention groups. And they're just people are entities that are in the light or in like business that come together, pool their money and create an insurance company. So that's what we did. We have an association that all the doctors join. So they say association actually owns. The insurance company. And while we do have to follow some of the laws of the states we primarily are domiciled in Vermont and there are a regulator. And They're really the state of the art regulators for these kind of companies and what they call captive management. So, very important that you get into a state that knows what they're doing. And we've, we've as you said, are, have a lot of ability to be more entrepreneurial and nimble, and, and work with physicians, especially those that the traditional carriers may not want to underwrite.

Dr. Maryal Concepcion: 30:25

And for those listeners who are like, wait a minute I want to know more. What are some of the benefits that you really love speaking to when it comes to introducing a DPC doctor or a soon to be DPC doctor to. Malpractice through care.

Dr. Neal Douglas: 30:40

The biggest thing for me is the relationship, the fact that you could call that I know the people at care and that helps me a ton because again, it's nice to know that they understand where we're at. The, the coverage, a lot, oftentimes the coverage is mandated by state. And so those coverage options, and you can always opt for more coverage but certainly to maintain your medical license, you do need a certain level of coverage and, obviously they're well aware of what those coverage limits are and they provide. that coverage or more with that quote that they would give you and I appreciate that and they can walk you through that piece too. And then, yeah, I, I believe there are other benefits that go along with that, whether you have a locum tendens person who's working under your malpractice temporarily, and I think they have some options for that. So if you are someone who's, looking for locum tendens work with DPC doctor of care, I think, That would be covered. But really, I mean, if you're like, okay, why did you choose care? Neil, it's, it's the relationship that I have with them. I would, I would liken it to, when you have a financial advisor, somebody who like kind of understands you and your family and what you do and you're like, hey, I'm going to trust something really important with you because we have a relationship together. Like that, I guess that's the way it feels. And I never would have ever expected to have that level of relationship with a malpractice provider. We just finished my episode, which talks about like the procedures I do. A lot of things that a lot of doctors wouldn't necessarily do, but it's with those patients who know me, who trust me, I mean, I'll give you just a two minute snippet. Patient comes in with pleural effusion who had very high cancer markers, very concerning. We either had a differential of pneumonia and a severe pneumonia or cancer and CT scan comes back. negative, but even before we did that step, I told her, I said, I've got an ultrasound machine. I've done this before in residency. We can pull a little bit of this fluid off your chest and I can get an answer tomorrow from the cytologist if you have cancer or not. And that way you're not going to spend two weeks waiting for the interventional radiologist to get you into their clinic. And then you're going to have that answer much sooner. And I can see everything I'm doing with this machine and we're ready to go. That I mean, the quality of care for that patient. She was so delighted to know the next day that she had a severe pneumonia. It wasn't cancer. And we're watching those cancer markers go down. But patient who's not insured. I don't even know what the price of that would be. I mean, you just reach into your, little monopoly game and grab out a handful of whatever, that's probably going to be about prize. We have no idea. It's just so frustrating. So anyway, part of, so, so the procedure side of things. I appreciate we aren't doing like that, the known high risk procedures but there are a lot of procedures that are being done in direct primary care and, and yeah, we appreciate that care covers us for doing those types of things.

Dr. Robert Pope: 33:45

Again, the relationship with the patient is paramount. You have a good relationship and you have good communication with the patient and the family too. The family is very important. It's the, the chances, the likelihood of having An incident or a case is very low, but you never know the lawyers out there. We haven't talked about them today, but the lawyers are always lurking out there for something. And you never know what could could trigger something.

Dr. Maryal Concepcion: 34:14

And something that I just, I'm thinking about as you guys are speaking is, yes, there is relationship and you guys are, are speaking to that, but also, Dr. Pup, when you mentioned continuity of care and finding that that was a very big problem with hospitalists because the model is there is a wall between your outpatient doctor or non physician provider and who takes care of you in the hospital in many cases. Yes, there are the people who still do coverage in the hospital, but when it comes to continuity of care, I mean, that continuity that Neil just spoke of, I mean, it's, it's, it is so life changing for the patient. You can picture these patients because we've all taken care of somebody even, you could even be your first day in DPC and you're like, I literally, I could never have done this in fee for service and because of having time with a patient, I literally just saved their life. Like it's, I mean, Neil and I could literally just ping pong examples that we've had in our own clinics, and it's, it's so, it is, it is so awesome to have that feeling as a doctor and to be able to also have a company like care backing that up by supporting us and understanding what we do and why we do it. So if you would like to learn more go to the link in the show notes. And also you can check out the blog accompanying this podcast where you'll find links to learn more about care. And for those of you who want additional details right now, and you're ready Um, the phone number is area code 5 0 2. 2 0 8 3 8 9 8 or you can email Jason who Neil referred to J-A-S-O-N care I ns.com. So thank you so much Dr. Pope and Dr. Douglas for sharing about care today. To introduce people to a, a relationship based company who understands the power of direct primary care.

Dr. Robert Pope: 36:06

Thanks for having me, Mario. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Dr. Pope. Good to see you. Okay, good to see you again.

Dr. Maryal Concepcion: 36:15

Thank you for joining us for another episode of My DPC Story, highlighting the physician experience in the world of direct primary care. I hope you found today's conversation insightful and inspiring. If you want to dive deeper into the direct primary care movement, consider joining our My DPC Story Patreon community. Here you'll have access to exclusive content, including more interview topics and much more. Don't forget to subscribe to My DPC Story on your podcast feed and follow us on social media as well. If you're able, I'd greatly appreciate if you could leave us a review. It helps others to find the podcast. Until next time, stay informed, stay healthy, and keep advocating for DPC. Read more about DPC news on the daily at dpcnews. com. Until next week, this is Mariel Concepcion.