The key to getting patients into your Direct Primary Care practice is to educate them on what you do. You must remember that the public still does NOT understand us. You have got to figure out a way to explain why their addiction to the broken primary care model is bad for them both financially and for their health.

This is called reframing. For example, I really enjoy the I Love Marketing podcast. Here was their example:

“You know the café by my office where I go every morning. The girl there Christy has been making these cookies that are like with oatmeal and all good stuff in the cookies. But she reframed it, she puts a basket of them out in the morning with a sign that says breakfast cookies, and people gobble them up. They want an excuse like it’s okay to have a cookie for breakfast because these are breakfast cookies.”

Fortunately, you are not the first to do this in DPC. I have tons of ways to reframe things in all three of my books.

You may want to start by working on your elevator pitch. Here are some examples:

1. You know how people can’t get in to see their doctors and if they do it is for about 5 min or less?  What DPC does is offer a monthly membership model that allows me to treat a much smaller panel of patients.  In fact, since we don’t deal with insurance companies we can see patients when they need to be seen, give them 30-60 during each visit and ultimately even save them money.
2. At ++++++++, we believe that going to the doctor should be simple and affordable.  So, we do things differently at our office. Instead of accepting health insurance, our patients pay a monthly fee and we see them as often as they need for whatever may ail them.  In addition to unlimited appointments, our members have access to discounted labs, like a cholesterol panel for $6, and wholesale meds, like BP meds for $1 and a Zpak for $2. Our patients can call, text or email their doctor directly for any of their concerns.  Would you like to learn more or sign up with us?
3. We return medicine to a healing relationship between a doctor and a patient rather than a business transaction.
4. “What if you didn’t have to wait for months to see your physicians, hours in a waiting room to only see your physician for 5 minutes, who doesn’t pay attention to you, but can see your physician the same day, not wait, and have him/her spend time with you to answer your concerns? Well, you can, with me, at ___________!”

There are so many ways you can tweak this and reframe your pitch. You will need to have different ideas for patients vs. businesses vs. the media. Don’t wing this. Sit down and organize and reframe the explanations that you need to give to people. Educate, educate, educate!

Last secret: study other practices that have opened and see what they wrote on their websites. We have highlighted over a 100 here.

Good luck!