Tuesday Morning With Justin: Healthcare, Leadership & Life
Tuesday Morning With Justin: Healthcare, Leadership & Life
Transforming Patient Care: The Rise of Direct Primary Care
Direct primary care is revolutionizing the way we think about healthcare, emphasizing quality and accessibility. Justin discusses the benefits of the membership model and the recent legislative support that could expand access to this model.
• Direct primary care centers the patient-physician relationship
• Emphasis on quality care over quantity
• New legislation could allow HSAs to fund membership fees
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Music by Alex Lambert.
Contact Justin via text 740-525-5259 or via email JFutrell@TrueNorthCompanies.com
I welcome the opportunity to hear your feedback from this episode!
Thanks again to my musically gifted friend Alex Lambert for the music. Also thanks to Kevin Asehan for the edits.
Welcome to another Tuesday Morning with Justin. I'm Justin Futrell, benefit Advisor at True North Companies, and today we're going to talk about direct primary care. Have you heard of it? Think about concierge medicine. That's a term sometimes people use. Direct primary care is an innovative healthcare model where you emphasize the patient-physician relationship. Also, there's a membership fee. It's known for quality care and to be very accessible. So let's just take a moment to talk about each.
Speaker 1:As you think about the patient-physician relationship, there are so many doctors and nurses who went into healthcare in order to help people and build relationships and make people healthier and be able to address whatever they're going through the challenge, the problem in our current healthcare landscape is that hospitals and insurance companies drive so much of the behavior of those providers. So, for example, I have a friend who's a nurse and was asked, strongly recommended, to not spend more than seven and a half minutes per patient before moving on to the next one. Of course, as you can imagine, the main driver is this is a for-profit health system, or even if it's a not-for-profit health system, but they're trying to maximize the amount of revenue they can drive in and so the patient-physician relationship has really become hindered over the years. I know I can personally tell you that I started getting frustrated when I couldn't book a primary care doctor appointment for six weeks. That seems insane. Has that ever happened to you? Now? Next, membership fee. So what is this model? Well, imagine like Netflix no matter how much or how little you watch Netflix, you pay your flat subscription each month. Same thing Imagine if you pay a fee and no matter how much or how little you use health care that month, you've got the subscription.
Speaker 1:Now some people think, well, if I don't really use the doctor, maybe it's not worth it. Well, I can tell you, that's who I was. I was in that bucket of people and what I found was that we go to the next point of quality care and accessible care. That's where it drives value for me personally. Quality care Well, you're getting, since you get to spend more time with your provider. You get a better scope of what's going on with you now and even conversations like hey, what do you want to work on in the future and can we help provide resources for that? And so a really good example is with accessibility and quality care. When it was flu season, came down with a bug, didn't know what it was exactly, and we just got like a two-page outline of almost everything. It could be based on the symptoms. Like a two-page outline of almost everything. It could be based on the symptoms. So, while we didn't get in until the next day so a one-day turnaround time for an appointment we had ammo for how to get through that next 24 hours. That compares to going to an urgent care seeing someone that you'll never see again versus actually building a relationship with a physician. Now, other things that people like accessibility, being able to pick up the phone and actually talk to someone. Some direct primary care facilities will allow texting or emailing. They're all a little different, as you can appreciate.
Speaker 1:So why are we talking about direct primary care today? Well, for one, the majority of acute care and preventative care. So think all of the small things that happen throughout a year to any given person. Set aside the big catastrophic knee surgeries and heart attacks. But all of the small things, the majority of care I think people argue whether it's 70 or 80% can be treated by direct primary care. But since so many small claims happen throughout the year, there are a lot of employers who are embedding direct primary care into their employer-sponsored health plan. By doing that, they're reducing the cost of insurance. So if the math works out and you can reduce your insurance costs and embed direct primary care, why wouldn't you do it right? It's better value for your people.
Speaker 1:Now I'm bringing this up today because there's a new house bill that would expand health savings accounts to help workers pay for direct primary care, in other words, this membership fee that we talked about. Imagine if you could use your health savings account money, your pre-tax dollars, to also pay for your membership fee. That would be huge. Now, this isn't a new thing. Direct primary care and specifically, bills around direct primary care, have been trying to be passed for a decade. 2015 was the first introduction to legislation for something like this.
Speaker 1:So then the question question I ask is why now? Why do we think it will actually pass through the House and the Senate now? Well, we have a bipartisan list of co-sponsors on the bill, and Senator Bill Cassidy out of Louisiana is the chairman of the Senate Health, labor and Pensions Committee, one of the committees which has jurisdiction over health care legislation. That's important because Bill Cassidy has historically been a major advocate for bills such as this, so there's a really good chance that one. If you haven't heard about direct primary care. You will soon, in addition to just myself right now. And two, there's a good chance that we'll be able to use health savings accounts to help pay for a membership fee, which is great, because why wouldn't we want better quality care and more accessible healthcare? All right, gang, until next week. If you like the show, go ahead and hit subscribe and give a five star review.
