“Sound the Alarm on System-Owned Urgent Care”
I doubt there’s an emergency room left in America that hasn’t been outsourced to a private equity company like Apollo, Team Health, or another similar entity. Likewise, independent urgent care centers are getting gobbled up by hospital systems left and right. Today’s story from Becker’s Hospital CFO Report says so.
Until our government stops allowing facility fees to be charged at what appears to be independent sites of care, it’s up to us to protect each other from crazy-high medical bills because care was sought at a “site of care” they didn’t know was owned by a hospital.
It’ll only take a simple Google search to bring up a report of a patient walking into a free-standing urgent care facility far from a hospital and receiving a bill in the mail months later for thousands of dollars. Let’s not stay silent when our fellow community members need to know how to avoid this fate.
It occurs to me that if hospitals smell urgent care blood in the water, independent urgent care practices will soon become an endangered species.
Here’s the good news for DPC
Your affordable, transparent monthly membership fee encourages patients to check in with you first before heading out into the wild west of our messed-up healthcare system. You’ve undoubtedly prevented hundreds if not thousands of urgent care visits simply because you are your patient’s “personal physician on speed dial.”
As I write this article, a quick call, secret shopper style, revealed that the self-pay rate to go to my local, independent urgent care is $130 at a minimum. A subsequent call to the hospital-owned urgent care across town ended in a hang up. A quick online search found that they close at 6pm on Saturdays, which, as I write this article, was 8 minutes ago. Too late to be cared for, I guess. It’s a solid strategy for the hospital because that means more business for the ER.
Here’s a call to action for you
Let your community know by publishing a short video testimonial of a patient who was saved from suffering financially when you took care of them, ending the need for an urgent care trip. Present the financials of the testimonial so that others can see the cost savings opportunities when they’re enrolled with your practice.
Here’s a personal testimonial…I was slicing onions at my parent’s house using a knife I wasn’t used to. I accidentally cut the tip of my pinky finger. It was just a sliver of skin, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop…or, at least in my inexperience, I wasn’t patient enough to wait for the bleeding to stop on its own.
So, I took a deep breath and decided to just be calm and call Dr. Kramer. I took a video of what was occurring and sent it to him via text. A minute or two later, he was calling my phone. We talked through it. He gave me a quick education on blood clotting techniques, prepared me for what to expect the next morning, and agreed to check in with each other then.
The story’s moral is that even what might have been deemed an emergency was easily handled in primary care, even without an office visit. This type of meaningful real-life story would resonate with your prospective patients too. The next time you handle something urgent for a patient, ask them if they’ll work with you to tell the story so others can realize the power of DPC.
Here’s something you can use
The Society for Human Resource Management released this article this week — Direct Primary Care: An Alternative Way to Curb Health Care Costs. Send a copy to the HR Director at an employer close to your practice and ask them to come meet you at the real-life version of what’s highlighted in the article. I bet they’ll consider your value with a new perspective. Once HR is convinced, then you’ll need help building a health plan around your DPC foundation. I can help you with that. I’m here for you.
