About Direct Primary Care

Direct Primary Care (DPC) is a model that removes the insurance between the physician and the patient as it was in the old days. This allows better, personalized care for the patient by allowing physician to focus on the patient and be accessible to them. Direct Primary Care physicians usually have a panel of 600-800 patients instead of several thousands. Patients have longer visits with their doctor and have same or next day appointments.  They also have 24/7 access to their doctor via phone, text or email for medical necessities. All this at a low cost of a monthly cell phone bill. What’s more is that patients are able to get their in-house dispensed medications and labs at greatly reduced prices. As everything is transparent, there will be no hassles of dealing with insurance. 

No we do NOT take insurance. This sets us apart from most primary care clinics. Most importantly, this allows us to give you the time and the care you need, not what insurance thinks you need or qualify for. We spare you the hassles of insurance and deal directly with you. This allows all care to be transparent in pricing, enables the physician to spend more time with patients, saves patients money, eliminates waiting times in clinic and allows direct access to the physician. This means no co-pays, no deductibles, no hidden fees.

Direct Primary Care is not insurance. Therefore we do encourage all of our members to maintain at least a catastrophic high deductible insurance plan with a low monthly premium, a major medical plan or a health-share plan. Members can often save money by switching from their high monthly premium plans to catastrophic insurance plans with low monthly premiums. Alternatively, you may choose a health-share plan (eg Libertyshare or Sedera), which often reimburses a certain portion of your monthly DPC membership fee or offer discounts for being a DPC patient. 

When you go to any other primary care office, you will either pay a co-pay or pay for the full doctor’s visit each time until you meet your deductible. Just because you have insurance doesn’t mean you don’t pay twice as co-pays and office visits add up! If you have a high deductible plan, then you will pay everything out of pocket until the deductible is met. With each doctor’s visit being at least $150 per visit (not including any lab fees), after 4 doctor’s office visits, you will already have paid a year’s worth of our membership. This is not to mention that in our office, where you can come in unlimited number of times, you will have 30-60 minutes with the physician (in contrast to the 7-10 minutes you likely will get on each of those 4 visits elsewhere), get labs done at 90% discounted price, and have access to wholesales medications that only cost pennies on the dollar.  

We provide wholesales discount prices on prescriptions and labs. You will be amazed at how much you will save just from this feature alone. We also dispense your medications to you in-house, allowing our clinic to be your one stop shop for medical care and medications. No more lines in the pharmacy. Most labs are drawn in clinic and send out daily to the lab. All lab costs are at face value and will be available to you up front to ensure transparency. You will be informed of your results as soon as they are available.

We have contracted with select vendors to provide our members with greatly reduced self-pay rates, or you can choose to use your insurance. Examples of these rates include an X-ray for $50, CT for $225, MRI for $450 (all include the radiologist reading).

We believe that we can handle most of your needs within our full spectrum family medicine practice. However, when needed we will provide the coordination of care with specialists as part of your membership benefit. If you don’t have insurance, we can arrange affordable rates to be seen by a specialist.

You will enjoy the benefits just as much if you were living a few minutes down the clinic.  You don’t have to drive to the clinic each time you have a question as our patients can access their physician via text, phone or email. Besides, you might notice that driving 20 minutes for your appointment here but not having to wait in the waiting room  is often more convenient than driving for a few minutes but waiting for an hour. 

We accept all major credit cards and direct bank transfers (ACH) for automatic payments, which are made monthly or every 3, 6, or 12 months.

Yes, you can use your HSA funds for membership. We believe that, in many cases, you should be able to pay for your membership fees through your HSA or FSA account as well because the services we offer are qualified services; however, different plans have different requirements. You should confirm with your plan administrator to be absolutely sure. 

Our patients have the option to pay monthly or every 3,6, or 12 months. However, we do require a minimum of 6 month membership. 

Yes. Otherwise it would be using our clinic as a cheap urgent care visit, and it defeats the purpose. The membership pays for the access to the physician. This is just like a gym membership where you pay the same monthly membership fee whether you go in once or five times or don’t go in at all for the month.

Although we currently are not able to care for Medicare and Medicare-eligible patients due to very strict federal rules on this subject, we will soon be able to start accepting members who have or are eligible for Medicare. To get on the waiting list, please send us an email at info@birminghamdpc.com. (Note: this does not mean we will accept medicare for our services as we are an insurance-free clinic.)