Direct Primary Care (DPC) directory now includes practices seeking physicians

[FamilymedMD]

DPC Alliance Directory hiring subset

Disclosure- I'm a DPCA member but not involved in this project other than we're one of the practices listed.

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[KeikoTanaka]

How many doctors realistically is appropriate to have under one roof as part of a DPC clinic? Does this lighten the burden? Do the doctors share the same patients? Do they have their own patients solely? How does salary work, do they each take home 50% of the monthly earnings?

 

[FamilymedMD]

I'm solo for now so can't give you DPC group experience but from my experience in third party paid, FFS group practice probably 3-5 docs is the sweet spot. Many more than that and you need to add management staff or layers and it gets complicated.

Size has some advantages though. Cross covering vacations is even easier (although not a problem for most solo docs). Docs in the group will have different skills and expertise that makes the group smarter and better for patients than any one doc. With enough patient volume, hiring or training a rad tech becomes worthwhile and inexpensive plain films in-house become another service that patients value.

How to split up overhead requires some thought, especially how to hand fixed costs vs costs per patient or costs per physician, but is no different from insurance paid group practices.

Most DPC patients prefer seeing their own doc most of the time so that would impact how much you'd want to share patients.

Ask at DPC University Community

 

[KeikoTanaka]

I'm solo for now so can't give you DPC group experience but from my experience in third party paid, FFS group practice probably 3-5 docs is the sweet spot. Many more than that and you need to add management staff or layers and it gets complicated.

Size has some advantages though. Cross covering vacations is even easier (although not a problem for most solo docs). Docs in the group will have different skills and expertise that makes the group smarter and better for patients than any one doc. With enough patient volume, hiring or training a rad tech becomes worthwhile and inexpensive plain films in-house become another service that patients value.

How to split up overhead requires some thought, especially how to hand fixed costs vs costs per patient or costs per physician, but is no different from insurance paid group practices.

Most DPC patients prefer seeing their own doc most of the time so that would impact how much you'd want to share patients.

Ask at DPC University Community

I know you're up in Rockland, which isn't the most densely populated part of Maine - Do you feel like that is still a large enough of a town that you can still be successful with up to 5 doctors, and all still make a very reasonable salary? Is there that much demand for DPC in such a size of a town?

 

[FamilymedMD]

I was referring to practice size considerations in general. Location matters as well for both FFS and DPC but probably more for DPC currently as it has a smaller share of the population to draw from (for now).

Specific to my area, I'm just outside Rockland across from the West Rockport Post Office at a busy intersection of two state roads so I draw patients from all of Knox County. I'm confident that two docs would do very well and probably a third. For five docs in my area, we'd need to further penetrate the employer market which is getting ripped off by traditional carriers and their agents. We already have some employers sponsoring a small percentage of our current patient panel. We're focusing our marketing and our outreach on employers (we have a wait list of individual patients) mainly to speed up growth when we add physician(s).

Remember, unlike the old paper chart days, it's relatively easy to have a couple of locations for a single practice since our charts are online. The main limitations would be cost of staff and big equipment items. If employers and patients were slow to join a new doc's panel, we could always put another office 30 min north in Belfast.