Why I Decided on a DPC Practice
At my last job with Walmart, I had an important work meeting that popped up. I had to fly out to meet with a partner for our health centers. As I booked the flight, I realized I had a conflict. I had a doctor’s appointment with my PCP. I see him every six months for my blood pressure (I eat too much salt!) and he needed to check me out, do labs, adjust my medicine, and so on. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just call and move the appointment a couple of weeks.”
Twenty minutes of hold time later, the scheduler told me that my doctor’s next available appointment time was six months later. I figured there was no way that this could be true, so I sent a message on the patient portal to my doc, figuring he’d sort it out. But his nurse answered, and confirmed that unless I was actively sick, he wouldn’t be able to see me for months.
My doctor is awesome. I love him. But he’s trapped in a system that he can’t control. He has thousands of patients under his care, his paperwork keeps him up until 11:30 at night, and he is forced to see 20 or 30 patients every day. And even as hard as he works, I had to wait six months to see him.
There’s gotta be a better way, right?
Direct Primary Care is the better way. In a DPC practice, the patient pays a subscription fee monthly to a doctor who agrees to provide primary care to them. The doctor keeps the practice small (in ours, we are targeting 400 patients or so) which means they can spend lots of time getting to know patients and taking care of them. That extra time pays off. The doctor can work hard for the patient — and indeed, has to, because the patient is paying the bill directly!
As a DPC doctor, I take pride in speedy response times and easy access to care. You can text or call us directly, and get an answer back right away direct from me. If you need to be seen, we can almost always see you on the same or the next day. If a phone call or a video call is better for you, that’s awesome with us.
If this sounds great to you, that’s because it is! Give us a call at (314) 464-9333 or schedule an appointment for yourself and let’s make you a patient. We could be talking in less time than it took you to read this blurb!
