The recent Take Medicine Back virtual summit was focusing on how doctors are “losing their profession to corporatization,” leading to possible moral injury and patient harm. One of the panelists, Ben Aiken MD, was highlighted really well in this MedPage Today article. Here are some highlights:

Ben Aiken, MD, a family physician and founder of the direct primary care practice Lantern Health in Asheville, has remained a proponent of changing the way that healthcare is delivered, he said during the panel.

Aiken said he launched the direct primary care practice he now operates independently as a pilot with Mission Health in 2018, shortly before its acquisition by HCA was announced. However, he was then one of the first physicians to transition a practice out of the system in the wake of the deal, he said.

In contrast to a traditional fee-for-service model, “in direct primary care, you replace that by a monthly fee. So, it becomes much like a gym membership, where you pay a monthly fee and for that monthly fee you get unlimited access to your doctor or your care team as well as access to various other things,” Aiken said.

“So, the incentive is actually flipped,” Aiken said. “And at the core of direct primary care, I think that’s the foundational value in the sense that my incentive is to keep people as healthy as possible. In my previous model, in previous practice, the sicker someone was, the better I did.”

“Now, if somebody in my panel is extremely sick, and they come and see me every week, and that happened with all of my patients, the model would break,” he said, adding that, “the incentive is for me to keep people as healthy as possible.”

Some people may say, “‘Well, hey, you know if that’s the case, why don’t you just avoid seeing somebody altogether? If they don’t come at all? Wouldn’t that be ideal?'” Aiken acknowledged.

However, “[the] counter incentive there is really that, if somebody doesn’t like their experience with me, because their ability to see me is not tied to their insurance company, they can simply fire me,” he said. “So, the incentive is for me to deliver an excellent experience, and really to kind of change the experience of what somebody has from a primary care perspective.”

Did you get that? If they don’t like you as a DPC then they will leave. That’s a quality metric that counts. If you are new you should be saving these types of quotes and memorizing them.

Great job, Dr. Aiken!