Open Enrollment For Families
Hi, thank you for coming back for the latest edition of Beyond Primary Care’s blog- Primary Care Physicians Accepting New Patients. In Beyond Primary Care blogs we highlight healthcare news, advice for medical conditions, and how membership for care works! Beyond Primary Care is an insurance free, membership based family medicine clinic. Beyond Primary Care is the highest rated Direct Primary Care clinic serving patients in Ann Arbor and throughout Washtenaw, Livingston, and Wayne counties giving families and employers peace of mind about healthcare costs by providing affordable and accessible primary care services.
The primary purpose of the blog is to introduce healthy lifestyle concepts and answer common questions I receive from patients that I believe are important. I want to start discussions that will help educate, benefit, and improve your well-being.
In this blog post, we want to educate our patients and any prospective patients about:
Open Enrollment For Families
For millions of people, the current American healthcare system makes it hard to get an appointment with your doctor when you have a medical concern. A report from the Merritt Hawkins’ 2017 Survey of physician appointment wait times found that the average new patient physician appointment wait times increased significantly to 24.1 days, up 30% from 2014. For the best health outcomes, we need to remove these barriers to your doctor.
Direct Primary Care isn’t insurance. Instead, it’s a unique high value membership that can be offered standalone or used to supplement high-deductible health plans and catastrophic plans. At its basic level, DPC means the doctor works directly for the patient. No private insurance, no medicaid, no medicare, no middlemen. Since we are insurance free, DPC clinics contract with employers through a membership.
Care When You Need It & Better Health Outcomes
At a typical insurance-based clinic, doctors purposely over fill their daily schedules and rarely have time for same day or next day appointments. People who need immediate care are being turned away to less personal, costlier options such as minute walk in clinics and hospital emergency rooms which are the main causes of healthcare spending.
This is important.
Why? With Direct Primary Care (DPC) the less families spend on a health insurance plan, the more they can put back into their savings or other needs. Families can focus on building prevention based healthcare versus building the archaic insurer ‘problem-based’ healthcare. DPC offers affordable and accessible healthcare for individuals, families, or employers. DPC clinics eliminate the traditional insurance middlemen through a membership model of care.
At Beyond Primary Care we routinely offer all our members opportunities for same day and next day appointments with the same doctor who is already familiar with you and your medical history.
Cost Control Through Timely Access
Through spells and magic, the DPC model offers much more accessible medical care and much lower prices, occurring simultaneously. How can this be? It’s the incentives.
In our current healthcare model, health insurance companies are positioned between the patient and the physicians, and have different objectives. Health insurance companies want to make as much profit as possible, after all- they have shareholders to report to. They will maximize the money collected from you, while minimizing the amount they pay the doctors. In traditional healthcare systems, this incentives doctors to pack their schedules completely full everyday.
This is important.
Why?
With DPC, there is no arbitrary and expensive force in the middle to slag things up. DPC doctors have NO pressure to pack their schedules and as a result have the ability to improve patient care not by focusing their patient’s most processing needs. The goal is to maximize individual health and minimize cost to the family. Innovate by subscribing yourself (and your family too) to a local Direct Primary Care office. At no extra cost- you will get.
deeply discounted prices for blood tests
deeply discounted prices for radiology studies
generic medications dispensed from the office at near wholesale cost
Beyond Primary Care Removing Barriers
Beyond Primary Care’s mission is to provide affordable, accessible, and personalized healthcare. We are constantly working towards improving accessibility and communication with our patients through new physicians, office staff, and a secure patient portal. By removing health insurance barriers, Dr. O’Boyle can improve access by engaging with patients directly via email, phone, text message, and video calls.
Beyond Primary Care is a DPC clinic located in Ann Arbor, Michigan and cares for patients all throughout Washtenaw County, Wayne County, and Livingston counties.
Thank you for reading.
- Dr. Jeff O’Boyle with Beyond Primary Care
