Practice the way you wish you could.
Let me help you attract cash-pay patients to make it possible.
Old practice, new practice, or one still on the drawing board.
Subscription, fee-for-service or hybrid. Even if you are still taking insurance.
Marketing and Awareness
If you are not seeing all the patients you want to see, I can work with you to aggressively market your practice in your area and make sure you are visible in the growing constellation of cash-pay-friendly interest groups. I can work with you to perform cash-pay promotion campaigns to prospective patients, give your social media and website a tune-up, and turn you on to great SEO resources for this niche market.
Patients still don’t know.
Most patients still do not know that they can affordably get the kind of attention from doctors that was the norm 50 years ago. More and more patients are frustrated by 15 minute exams, one-shot solutions with too many return visits, competing with a computer for the doc’s attention, and unhelpful staff. Well-planned marketing can show patients that superior access to a great doc is within their financial reach.
Evolution of Health Plans
Big health insurance companies are dedicated to steadily increasing the profit they make from a mature industry. This means that year after year, they will take actions to get doctors to do the same work for less reimbursement.
Drives for Efficiency: Good and Bad
A drive to increase efficiency is sometimes a good thing. When customers and professional service providers both have effective agency to guide their relationships, reward good change, and resist bad change, then drives for efficiency are a part of normal economic evolution and can benefit all involved. That does not describe the evolution of medicine in the United States since the late 1960s. Health plans became the primary vehicle for contact between most patients and providers, effectively removing normal economic feedback mechanisms on both sides. Patients could not afford to turn down a health plan benefit at work, and providers could not afford to spend as much time with a patient as they should to really address the whole patient, plus, protocols and formularies could make it hard to give a patient one’s best medical advice.
Then vs. Now
When the number of covered lives was growing in the early days of health plans, increasing profits without reducing payments to providers was no problem. Medicare has a similar history: in the early years, the program paid doctors’ going rate, to get doctors on-board, but in ensuing years, trapped doctors would find it too daunting to fight the system. Today is a different story. The big health plans are infamous for inconvenience, opacity in their operations, annual premium increases, and benefit restrictions. Medicare is seen as byzantine, prone to fraud, and potentially headed for insolvency. This is not progress.
The Solution
Frustrated patients are ready to hear the promise of direct-pay medicine and to act on it. Frustrated healthcare providers are ready to break free from the strictures of working within health plans. Direct-pay can restore healthy relationships between patients and providers, and it can drive good efficiencies in the market for medical care. Let’s find those patients together!
