Fox 5 Atlanta reported that Highland Urgent Care and Family Medicine‘s Dr. Nick Beaulieu, pictured above, announced to his patients that the practice would be changing to a Direct Primary Care model. Beaulieu is part of Pear’d, a network of six metro Atlanta primary care clinics, all of them connected to urgent care clinics, that have switched to the direct care or fee-based model. Like many other physicians, Dr. Beaulieu believes DPC is the way he can best provide quality care for patients.

The direct care model takes the insurance middlemen out of the picture and buys me time to focus on keeping my patients healthy. When you see in 30 patients a day for seven minutes, you don’t know your patients and you really can’t help. We want to produce something between two people who have equal investment in the process.

Dr. Beaulieu has over 25 years’ experience in Family Medicine, Urgent Care, Travel Medicine, and Emergency Medicine. He’s dedicated his whole career to building an independent, family-run, community-focused practice and finding innovative ways to make healthcare, effective, efficient, accessible, and fairly prices for all patients, whether they have insurance or not. He oversees the Urgent Care Clinic, Family Medicine Practice, and Travel Medicine Clinic.

Joining  him in the practice is Amy Hatfield, PA, Dian Dowling Evans, PhD, FNP-BC, ENP-C, and Lee Economy, FNP-C, ENPC.