How to Raise Your Prices at your Direct Primary Care Practice
As a direct primary care doctor, you may come to a point where your prices don’t match the value that you provide to your community. Throughout this pandemic, we’ve gone above and beyond for our patients, so we’ve maintained a high level of care and service for the people who are members of our direct primary care practice. The pandemic has presented many challenges, one of those big challenges is the rising cost of necessary supplies and equipment for running our practice.
This month, as a group, we decided it was time to raise our prices to maintain our sustainability as a family medicine practice, while still keeping our service affordable for our members and community.
Here are the simple steps you can take to raise your prices in your direct primary care practice:
1.) Send everyone an email that you’re raising your prices.
2.) Be prepared for praise and criticism, and a few cancellations.
3.) Keep doing the great work that has helped you attract and retain patients thus far.
4.) Realize that there is no perfect answer, and keep moving forward and doing your best work every day.
Sample Letter for Raising Prices at your Direct Primary Care Practice
We wrote up a short and easy to digest email about raising our prices. We wanted to keep it simple without too much extra information.
At this time, we are raising our prices for most of our membership tiers. These pricing changes will go into effect on March 1st, 2022. Our new pricing sets are as follows:
Children, 0 to 17 years of age: $15 per month (an increase of $5/month)
Adults, 18 to 39 years of age: $55 per month (an increase of $6/month)
Older Adults 40 to 64 years of age: $75 per month (an increase of $6/month)
Senior Adults 65 and up: $89 per month (no change)
We had to make this difficult decision because of several factors including the increasing complexity of the services that we deliver at our clinic and the rising costs of necessary supplies and equipment for our business.
For example, pre-pandemic, a box of 200 latex gloves would cost $9.95, now it costs $24.95 for that same box of gloves.
We remain committed to delivering affordable and accessible health care services. These price increases will allow us to continue to deliver excellent care and service.
We appreciate you for being a part of the service, and our unending thanks for being a part of the our clinic.
Sincerely,
The Doctors of the Practice
Praise we received after raising our prices
Interestingly, we received a ton of praise after raising our prices! Here’s a smattering of what folks said:
“Still the best deal in town!!!!!!”
“It’s worth it.”
“Thanks for letting me know. I think it’s only fair and justified!”
“Makes sense- everyone is experiencing these price increases. You're doing amazing- people get it.”
“As a small business owner who works (mostly) off a subscription model as well, i always talk about how i want my clients to look at what they pay me and say to themselves: ‘That’s the most valuable $xxx.xx i spend per month.’ I can tell you that as a customer in this case, the money I pay towards your services is the most valuable dang money i pay out every single month. Thank you for all that you do.”
Cancellations After We Raised Prices
We have faced some cancellations - 24 hours after our price increase, we have had about 8 people close their accounts. This month, we’ve had 46 new patients enroll in our service. We have had steady growth over the past few months and years, and our growth has almost always been greater than our attrition. That will hold true for this month as well. We currently have 1,125 patients in our practice.
In Summary
In summary, if you feel like your prices are too low, they probably are. Be bold and make the price increase so that you can feel good about the work that you do and the value that you provide for your patients and the community.
HOW CAN I LEARN MORE ABOUT STARTING A DIRECT PRIMARY CARE PRACTICE?
If you enjoyed reading this blog post and if you want to learn more about starting and growing your direct primary care practice, look no further than our book and our courses on how to start and grow your direct primary care practice. We at Startup DPC have begun compiling some of the best content available on this blog, in our book, and in our courses.
The best place to start is to take our Direct Primary Care Business Plan course, available here. From there, you can learn how to attract new patients to your direct primary care practice and how to find the perfect location or build out the practice of your dreams.
Thanks for reading and watching, and best of luck in your direct primary care journey!
-Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC