Relentless Health Value

Direct primary care (DPC) could be a way for primary care physicians to take back primary care. I’ll let my guest today, Dr. Alex Lickerman from ImagineMD, explain more about what DPC is and its promise, but in a nutshell, DPC is physicians billing a monthly retainer to patients or their employers directly, no insurance involved.

Alex Lickerman, MD is a primary care physician, author, speaker, entrepreneur, and founder of ImagineMD, a direct primary care medical practice headquartered in Chicago. ImagineMD works with self-insured and fully-insured businesses and their benefits consultants to help lower health care costs and improve the access to—and quality of—health care for their employees. This enables businesses to attract and retain top talent, as well as increase productivity and reduce absenteeism—all to increase the value of the business itself.

00:00 What is direct primary care, and what problem is DPC trying to solve?
01:00 How DPC can improve access to care.
03:45 Defining DPC.
04:00 Concierge medicine vs direct primary care.
06:50 How DPC solves for cost issues.
07:50 “Spending money on unnecessary tests and procedures is actually killing people.”
09:45 Hyperdiagnosis vs overdiagnosis.
11:50 “Primary care doctors are specialists in problems.”
13:30 How to engage with DPC.
17:15 What insurance companies think of DPCs.
20:00 The issues with perverse incentives to get more care.
20:45 How hospitals feel about DPCs.
26:10 “Only 2% of medical students are interested in going into primary care.”
26:40 How DPC is making primary care as a profession more appealing to medical students.
29:00 Disparity of care.
33:30 “The solution we have is actually a better one.”
35:25 ImagineMD—who they are and what they do.
36:25 You can learn more about DPC and ImagineMD at www.imaginemd.net.