Why some doctors and patients love direct primary care
What do various flavors of DirectPrimaryCare save employers? OneMedical (‘Exceptional Primary Care”) saved Google 🔳8% according to its S1. Meh. NexteraHealth measured 🔳29% in its most recent study. Exceptional. PaladinaHealth 18% on outpatient comparables.
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Qliance offered it had 27% fewer ER visits, 60% fewer hospital days and cost their employers 🔳20% less on average than similar non-Qliance patients in the area.
IoraHealth says 83% of the patients in its practices with high blood pressure have it under control; the national average is 63%.
RHealth, a Philadelphia-based group, says it can save self-funded employers 🔳15% on their total costs, and has high rates of cancer and cholesterol screenings, medication adherence and blood-sugar control. R-Health has teamed up with Aetna and Humana to offer unlimited primary care at four of its practices to New Jersey state employees. It hopes to enroll as many as 60,000 of the 800,000 eligible workers . “We need to hire a lot of doctors,” says Mason Reiner, R-Health’s CEO.
And therein lies a big challenge: Scaling up the model significantly could exacerbate the shortage of primary-care doctors.