Startup DPC

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Marketing Your Direct Primary Care Practice

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how to market your direct primary care practice

Today I got a wonderful email from a 3rd year resident who wants to start a DPC practice right out of residency. This is commendable! and echoes what I did as a doctor starting a DPC right after residency completion.

He took our Startup DPC course on Writing a Business Plan and his big ask was as follows: “I wrote this long piece of content, what do you think?”

Overall, the content he wrote was good! It explained his ethos and the ethos of his clinic. But, I told him that one piece of content doesn’t move the needle. I asked him:

“can you consistently make a new piece of content each week, every week, for 5 years? That's the real question. I usually spend about 1 hour each week creating a piece of content to support my DPC practice. This consistency is what draws new members to our practice. It's nice to have a short video or blog post that explains your ethos, but can you create a new piece of content each week?”

How to consistently create content

The best way to consistently create content is to take photos of the work you do in your clinic and to take photos of the work you do in the community. Family photos and hyperlocal content does well also.

You should always be thinking about content creation and trying to capture the moments that visually explain what you do in your DPC practice and how you do it and what it means for the community. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!

Now, take those pictures, add a caption and post them to your favorite social media channels. I use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok most often, in that order. If you can create an engaging piece of content every month, you will have great success with your marketing efforts for your Direct Primary Care practice.

Examples from Plum HEalth DPC

Here are some examples from my business, Plum Health DPC, from the last 4 months of 2022: 

6 years in business: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmt81PZL3JB/

Influenza A updates: https://www.instagram.com/p/CmXKf6OvMsu/

House call medicine: https://www.instagram.com/p/ClWl_TrvCC3/ 

Passing of a community physician, friend, and mentor: https://www.instagram.com/p/ClHXhYXvSBa/

Volunteering at a health fair: https://www.instagram.com/p/CjdM4ytL-g3/ 

Teaching other physicians about DPC: https://www.instagram.com/p/CjYJKr_L3Ka/ 

Talking about healthy foods in Detroit: https://www.instagram.com/p/CjBfbA0P7qz/ 

Laceration repair: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiA-KN6O7Or/

Here are a few more blog post ideas for your direct primary care practice:

  1. The benefits of direct primary care for patients

  2. Why you decided to start your direct primary care practice

  3. The differences between direct primary care and traditional primary care

  4. The role of technology in direct primary care (texting patients, emailing patients, video chats with patients)

  5. The importance of preventive care in direct primary care (how you have more time to address preventive medicine issues)

  6. Direct primary care and the opioid crisis (how you can help your patients manage pain more effectively with multiple modalities, rather than with a pill)

  7. Direct primary care and mental health

  8. The impact of direct primary care on healthcare costs

  9. The future of direct primary care

  10. Success stories from patients in a direct primary care practice

Good luck! and keep writing! It helps to keep your audience engaged and it helps to grow your practice when your community knows about you and your ethos.

-Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC

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You Have a Business When You Have Your First Customer

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What Does it Take to Start a Business?

This week, a friend asked about next steps for starting a new direct primary care business.

For smart people who’ve never started their own business, people like young doctors, young lawyers, or young dentists, graduating from medical school or professional school and entering the work force, it can feel like the only option for you is to get hired by a big firm or to join an existing practice.

But, you have to know that you can start your own business - and that’s the point of this blog post!

So how do you know when you have a business? When someone tells you that they want to pay you, yes you directly for your services, you have a business. For example, if a neighbor lady asks your son or daughter to mow their lawn, your child has a business. If that same neighbor wants to hire you as their doctor, you now have a business.

In short, you have a business when you have your first customer.

You Have a Business When You Have Your First Customer

Now that we know what makes a business, how do you capitalize on that business? Meaning, how do you legally accept payments from someone as a business, and not as an individual?

1.) Register for a PLLC - your PLLC can be anything, ours is "PLUM HEALTH PLLC" but we're doing business as (dba) Plum Health DPC. You could be Fred’s PLLC and dba "Smart Street Health", or Karl’s Dad's PLLC and dba Cool Dad DPC etc... The PLLC tells the state government that you have a business. Here in Michigan, we register PLLC’s, but it may be different in your state.

2.) Get an EIN from your accountant - once you register your PLLC, get the EIN from your accountant. This is a unique number that is essentially a social security number for your business. You need it to open any major accounts, including a bank account. From the IRS:

An employer identification number (EIN) is a nine-digit number assigned by the IRS. It's used to identify the tax accounts of employers and certain others who have no employees. The IRS uses the number to identify taxpayers who are required to file various business tax returns.

3.) Set up a bank account! I started mine with $90 that I had in my pocket:

4.) Deliver services - this could be refilling a medication, performing a physical exam, performing a Beck’s Depression Inventory, or giving a joint injection. Never underestimate how much value you can provide for patients with your brain and your stethoscope. As your company grows and as you refine your services, you’ll be offering more services and broader services. But for now, focus on getting started rather than having everything that you could possibly need to start.

As an example, I didn’t have an office when I first started - I started by making house calls for the first 2 months of my business. I also didn’t have an EKG machine when I started, but I bought one within 3 months of starting. I didn’t have a spirometer when I started, but I bought one within 5 months of running the business. As you get more revenue, you can use that extra revenue to make your services more robust.

5.) Track payments. This could be as simple as a spreadsheet with a Microsoft product or a Google Doc spread sheet, or it could be a more sophisticated product like QuickBooks or FreshBooks. I started during my first two months using Microsoft Excel to track revenue and expenses, but it was tedious! I quickly switched over to QuickBooks and I’ve never looked back. Often times, these companies will offer a free 30-day trial or a discounted fee for the first 3 months - it makes taking the leap easier. If you hate the service or the product interface, you can always switch companies!

NOW GET OUT THERE AND GET MORE CUSTOMERS.

Have a great weekend,

- Paul

P.S. If you enjoyed learning this material and if you want to take the next step, please check out the Startup DPC book - there’s a step-by-step guide on how to start your direct primary care practice in the book

Additionally, check out the Business Plan Course where I take a deep dive and show you how to write a business plan that will help you grow your direct primary care practice, starting with a written foundation.

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What Makes a Great Domain Name for a Direct Primary Care Practice?

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What Makes a Great Domain Name for a Direct Primary Care Practice?

When you start a business, you need to have a great brand name that’s easy to pronounce, easy to spell, easy to type, and easy to find online.

You don’t want to pick something so common that it will be confused for another brand. For example, don’t pick Apple Clinic or Apple Health - there’s a lot of “Apple”s out there - Apple computers, Apple records, Fuji Apples, Granny Smith Apples, etc…

You also don’t want to pick something that is so uncommon as to be confusing or so esoteric that only a few people will understand. For example, “Salus Health” might be cool if you’re a Latin Scholar, but for the average person, they may have a hard time pronouncing, remembering, or spelling this name.

I recently took a course on improving my presence online, and they had this great table for what makes a great domain name for your direct primary care practice.

Here’s a handy guide to helping you pick a great domain name for your direct primary care practice.

For us, I’ll break down the pros and cons of using “PlumHealthDPC.com” for our business.

  1. Easy to type

    • Yes, PlumHealthDPC.com is relatively easy to type - there are about 13 letters

    • I would have preferred PlumHealth.com, but that domain was already taken

    • The idea here is to keep it simple, “DPC” is hard to communicate over the phone, so in general I would avoid including “DPC” in the name

    • Better domains for our practice would have been “PlumMedical.com” or “PlumClinic.com”

  2. Includes Keywords

    • Our name includes “Health” so that’s a plus

    • We could have been “Detroit Primary Care Clinic” or “DetroitDirectCare.com” but these get a little too long, and I don’t want to be confined to Detroit only - I would like to expand at some point beyond Detroit, so I don’t want to use “Detroit” in our name

  3. Available online and in real life

    • The great thing about Plum Health DPC is that it’s available as a business name and it’s available as a web domain at www.PlumHealthDPC.com

    • We registered our LLC as Plum Health DPC

    • There are no other companies nationwide called Plum Health

    • There is a local Plum Market, but at the time that we started, it had no locations in Detroit or Wayne County

  4. Reflects your type of business

    • Yes, Plum Health DPC reflects our type of busines

    • BUT not everyone knows what DPC or Direct Primary Care is

    • People generally understand that we’re a health care company, clinic, or primary care office by our name

  5. Protects your brand

    • In addition to PlumHealthDPC.com, we bought PlumHealthDetroit.com, which redirects to the former web address

    • So, if we’re on the phone with a prospective patient and they can’t understand “DPC”, we tell them to go to PlumHealthDetroit.com

I hope this helps as you brain storm your brand name and domain name!

-Dr. Paul Thomas with Plum Health DPC and Startup DPC


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How Long do Patients Stay at Your Direct Primary Care Practice?

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How Long do Patients Stay at Your Direct Primary Care Practice?

This week, we had a great question from one of our business analysts about the length of membership at Plum Health DPC. He wanted to know how long patients stay with our practice?

This is a difficult question to answer as our relationships with patients are ongoing - people are signing up with us this month who may stay with us for months or years or decades. We don’t know what these relationships will look like as they are just beginning.

However, we have been practicing at Plum health for the last 5 years and 8 months, so we have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Ongoing members vs Members who have joined and left

There is some nuance to this conversation - and it starts with two distinct groups. You have to think about the members who are still with us and the members who have joined and left our practice as two distinct groups.

Our Plum Health DPC practice has had a total of 2,499 patients enroll in our practice and we currently have 1,150 active members.

Members who have joined and left

The average length of membership for a patient that has joined and left is 10.24 months. This feels about right for me as a physician. A lot of the folks who enroll with us are in between jobs, or in between cities, or making a career transition, or they’re not satisfied with the care that they’re getting from another health care system. They join our practice as a stop gap between insurance coverages, or they join our practice for us to help them through a rough psychological or physiological or medical transition where they may need more care than typical.

After about 10 months of care, they’ve moved on to the next thing. This is an important piece of information for our business because it helps us to inform our price point. If our average price point is $60 per member per month, then we typically make $600 per member who enrolls in our service.

ongoing members or currently active members

The average length of membership for a patient that has joined and is still active or still currently a member of our practice is 24.69 months. This is amazing - at Plum Health, we love taking care of our patients for the long term.

This information is helpful, because it can continue to inform our price point going forward. The two pieces of data above help us calculate the value of each new patient that enrolls in our practice.

Why does this information matter?

The next piece of data to look at would be how many appointments and chart interactions, or about how much time our doctors spend with each patient, to calculate the value per hour for each physician’s time and effort.

From the Patient’s perspective

Most patients who enroll in our service perform the mental math in their head. They might say to themselves, “if I enroll in this service at $60 per month, and I plan to stay with Plum Health for 1 year, I will spend about $720.”

The second part of that conversation is something like, “in order for my insurance to kick in, I need to spend $7,000 (my deductible) on my own health care before my insurance pays for any of my health care expenses, so paying about 10% of that amount or $720 to Plum Health for unlimited primary care is a good deal.”

Or, if the patient is uninsured, they may say “I have no health insurance, and paying $720 a year to Plum Health to keep me out of the hospital or the emergency department or the urgent care is well worth it for me.”

Closing thoughts

I hope that this blog post is helpful for you as you start and grow your own direct primary care practice. This is an important model for our health care system here in the United States as direct primary care doctors tend to help folks who are left out by the traditional fee-for-service system.

Understanding how long patients typically use your service is invaluable. Understanding the lifetime value of the patients who uses your practice is also invaluable. These numbers will give you an idea of what you can expect in your direct primary care practice. The caveat is that our patient population at Plum Health DPC in Detroit may be younger and more mobile than other direct primary care practices.

Thanks for reading and have a great day,

-Paul Thomas MD with Plum Health DPC

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, read more of Dr. Paul Thomas’ thoughts on Direct Primary Care in the Startup DPC book, and watch more videos about direct primary care in the Startup DPC courses!

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Tips for Developing an Amazing Website for your Direct Primary Care Practice

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Tips for Developing an Amazing Website for your Direct Primary Care Practice

As a primary care doctor, you are unlikely to have any history of building a website or creating content online, and THAT IS OKAY. You don’t need to know how to write code, and you don’t need to know how to do complicated tasks online. However, you should know how to use a service like SquareSpace or Wix or GoDaddy to build your own website.

I like using SquareSpace, and both my PlumHealthDPC.com and this StartupDPC.com are built on the SquareSpace platform. It takes anywhere from 2 to 8 hours to build a decent website. You have to choose a theme and select the pages that you want. Some companies are going to a “one page website” where you have all of your information on one page without clicking to other pages. This would greatly simplify your web-building process.

However, as you can see, I take a more traditional or typical approach to my website. I have a main page, an about page, an FAQ page, a blog page, and then my schedule/enroll page. This meets the expectations of most of my potential customers and allows them to easily engage with my content.

I can also write many blog posts and add that information to my blog page, which increases my traffic and search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.

I have a lot of doctors ask me to develop their website for them. I charge $3,000 for this service as it takes a good amount of time and there is a decent amount of back-and-forth to get things just right for the doctor. Most good web designers charge this amount of money, and you can find someone to do the work for you on a site like Fiverr or UpWork or a similar free-lance friendly website.

I will say, your website is the most important part of your business. It’s the front door to your business, and it acts to attract new patients and enables them to enroll seamlessly. You must have an excellent website that is easy to use and does not have any broken links.

On a final note, I’m taking a digital marketing course right now to improve my digital marketing skills, and this was one of the topics: how to improve your website!

When you are building your website, it’s important to identify the goal of your website. For my Plum Health DPC website, my goal is to get more people to enroll in our direct primary care service. We achieve this goal by writing content on our blog to improve search engine optimization, and then sharing that content on our social media channels and back-linking to our blog to attract new readers, who hopefully become new members.

When you are building your website, it’s important to identify the goal of your website. For my Plum Health DPC website, my goal is to get more people to enroll in our direct primary care service.

Additionally, your website should be easy to navigate - as the old saying goes, keep it simple silly! If you have too much information, a cramped and crowded website, it may drive people away. Having enough white space allows your website to breathe and your potential customers to feel relaxed as they read through your information.

You should have your logo on each page, as that can add more credibility and professionalism. You should choose fonts and colors that complement your brand and your logo. I like to include videos and multimedia - written content paired with images and videos can help communicate the information to different audiences who consume information in different ways.

Additionally, your website should be easy to navigate - as the old saying goes, keep it simple silly! If you have too much information, a cramped and crowded website, it may drive people away. Having enough white space allows your website to breathe and your potential customers to feel relaxed as they read through your information. You should have your logo on each page, as that can add more credibility and professionalism. You should choose fonts and colors that complement your brand and your logo. I like to include videos and multimedia - written content paired with images and videos can help communicate the information to different audiences who consume information in different ways.

Thanks so much for reading! If you love this content, then check out our Sales Funnel course, where I go in-depth on how to attract more patients to your direct primary care practice. As a big hint, you need to have content on your website and a seamless way to enroll on your website to achieve this goal.

Have a great week!

-Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC and Plum Health DPC in Detroit, Michigan

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Startup DPC Reviewed on GoodReads.com

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Startup DPC Reviewed on GoodReads.com

This week, we took a look at our reviews for Startup DPC on GoodReads.com. Most of our reviews for Startup DPC are on Amazon.com, where we have 103 reviews for Startup DPC with an aggregate of five stars overall. On GoodReads.com, we have 15 ratings and 2 reviews for the Startup DPC book with an aggregate of 4.67 stars. These aren’t the most important metrics of all time, but they do give us an insight into our readers, and these positive reviews and great feed back show us that the material in the Startup DPC book is valuable for our readers - doctors who want to start and grow their own direct primary care practices.

This is a screen shot from GoodReads.com, a site that has 15 reviews for Startup DPC, our book about how to start and grow a direct primary care practice.

We got a glowing review from one of our readers, Ronald:

Dr. Paul Thomas writes: “You should start a direct primary care practice because you can become the doctor you’re meant to be.” There is a Japanese concept called Ikigai, or “your reason for being.” There’s no doubt what Dr. Paul’s reason for being is: to transform healthcare in the United States, transform the lives of his patients, better his community, and his profession. His passion bleeds through this book, and makes it an incredibly compelling read. It also is a nuts-to-bolts guide on how you can start your own Direct Primary Care practice, from marketing, branding, pricing, and a host of other issues that need to be addressed. When you read that we lose one doctor every day to physician suicide, the equivalent of an entire medical school graduating class, you realize that good people are working in a bad system. I absolutely love his question: “Who in this room would want a five minute haircut? No one raised their hand except for a bald guy. Why do you settle for a seven minute appointment for your health, for God’s sake?” Concierge and DPC medicine are transforming the way doctors provide, and patients consume, healthcare. It’s more affordable, convenient, accessible, but most importantly, it restores the sacred doctor-patient relationship. You will get an insider’s account of how Dr. Paul started his own practice, Plum Health, along with the trials, tribulations, and successes along his journey.

As someone who is interested in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that actually measure customer success, I loved the KPIs he measures at Plum Health: How many hospitalizations have we prevented? How many urgent care and emergency department visits have we prevented? If a patient has a weight loss goal. Management of their anxiety or depression, have we helped them meet that goal? How much money have we saved our patients? Have we decreased morbidity and mortality in our communities? These are much more difficult to measure accurately, but they get much closer to the truth regarding Plum’s efficacy as clinicians.

I hope this book is read by doctors looking to get back to why they became a doctor in the first place, rather than serving insurance companies and an unsustainable fee-for-service business model. And if you’re a patient, seriously consider finding a DPC doctor.

We have had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Paul two times, and a third one coming up on this book on June 26, 2020. You can listen to the first two interviews here…

This is a screen shot from GoodReads.com, a site that has 15 reviews for Startup DPC, our book about how to start and grow a direct primary care practice. One contributor wrote an in-depth review of our Startup DPC book, and for that we are grateful.

This is an extremely kind review, and we’re grateful for our readers and supporters. Our goal is to help as many doctors start and grow their direct primary care practices as possible. This model, and this movement, is essential to helping our patients and communities live healthier lives.

- Dr. Paul Thomas

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How to get Media Coverage for your Direct Primary Care Practice

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How to get Media Coverage for your Direct Primary Care Practice

Getting media coverage for your direct primary care practice is a challenge and an opportunity. You probably did NOT go to journalism school, and you probable have NOT worked at a public relations firm, so you probably don’t have an extensive list of media contacts.

That’s okay! We’re going to start building a list for you.

First thing, read your local publications and listen to your local public radio and watch your local television stations. Who is reporting on health care issues in your community? Can you reach out to them on Twitter or send them an email? If so, you can start to build a relationship with this journalist and become a trusted source for them.

Journalists need to quote experts when they write a news article, and you could be that go-to expert for their next piece on health care.

Reach Out to Journalists When You Have a Newsworthy Event

You might be launching your practice, or hosting a ribbon cutting ceremony at your office, or celebrating 5 years in business. If so, you should send an email or a text with a press release to all of the journalists on your media list. If they’ve worked with you in the past and you’ve helped them on a story in the past, they are more likely to help you with your news-worthy story.

This is where building relationships is helpful! The more relationships and the stronger relationships you have with folks in the media, the easier it will be for you to tell your stories about your practice.

An Example of Getting Media for our Direct Primary Care Practice

Last month, I was gearing up to speak at the Michigan Academy of Family Physicians annual conference on Mackinac Island. I looked through the speaker list and I reached out to everyone I wasn’t connected with. I wrote a quick “my name is Dr. Paul Thomas with Plum Health DPC in Detroit, and I’m looking forward to seeing you and meeting you on the Island.”

The moderator for the first session for the day was Robin Erb, a local journalist with Bridge Magazine in Detroit. She responded to my message on LinkedIn and she expressed interest in writing about our practice. I shared my schedule with her, and we had lunch together and talked about Plum Health. We also met up on Mackinac, I attended her session, she attended my presentation, and a few days later, she published the article about Direct Primary Care and our practice, as well as the broader DPC movement.

In short, if you want media coverage for your DPC practice, you have to connect with journalists via email or on social media, and give them something newsworthy to discuss in their article about you.

@plumhealthdpc Direct primary care is a relatively new practice model for health care delivery - we had a great write up in Bridge Michigan that goes deep on the topic and gets into the nuance and details #DirectPrimaryCare #PlumHealth #BridgeMichigan #RobinErb #HealthCare #HealthCareJournalism #DPCMovement #PrimaryCare #Michigan #Detroit ♬ original sound - plumhealthdpc

Best of luck! Here’s a little inspirational video on how you can get media coverage for your DPC practice:

@plumhealthdpc Getting media coverage for your direct primary care practice can be difficult, and in this short video I breakdown how we reached out to a local journalist to help them tell our story at Plum Health DPC! #directprimarycare #plumhealth #familymedicine #bridgemichigan #detroit #healthcare ♬ Music Instrument - Gerhard Siagian

-Paul Thomas, MD with Startup DPC

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Recent Review for Startup DPC Book

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Startup DPC Book Reaches 103 five star reviews

This week, the Startup DPC book reaches 103 five star reviews. Here’s one of our recent reviews:

This book is a must read for those interested in direct primary care. Very well written to the point while not missing out on any details. It will prepare even those with absolutely no knowledge or background in business (like myself) to be able to successfully start a DPC clinic.

Startup DPC reaches 103 five star reviews this week!

Also, here’s a very kind email that I received from one of our readers:

Hi Paul,

My name is [Doctor]. I'm a primary care physician and owner of the newly formed clinic [a} Direct Primary Care. I just wanted to send you an email of thanks. I've read your book twice now in the lead up to starting this company. Once, about 2 years ago when it first came out - I was incredibly inspired, but at that time, I was an employed physician and had a lot of self-doubt about whether I could really do it. This time around, I read it about 3 weeks ago in about 3 days after I left that same employed job after I was just fed up with feeling run down, anxious, depressed, and like a glorified employee - I read it the second time, not because I wanted to do DPC, but because I HAD to do DPC. I found my why and I credit your book with a lot of the momentum I am gaining in the community. We just launched our pre-enrollment today and already have 5 patients signed up. You have inspired me more than you can imagine. And I just wanted to say I appreciate you and everything you do for physicians.

Have a great day!

[Doctor]

All that’s to say I have a tremendous amount of gratitude for the doctors in this Direct Primary Care movement and I’m so happy and grateful that this Startup DPC book is a key resource for starting and growing a direct primary care practice.

-Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC

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How to get low cost labs for your direct primary care practice

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How to get low cost labs for your direct primary care practice

I am a physician in suburban Detroit that is interested in the DPC and house call-based primary care model. I recently watched your segment on the Channel 4 news and was particularly interested in:

  1. How do you run such low-cost labs (I looked into LabCorp & Quest and they were really expensive unless you do high-volume with them)

  2. Similarly, how do you get low-cost meds and imaging?

  3. What are the panel sizes that make sense for this model (I would guess that you would need a smaller panel size to support a higher-touch practice)

  4. How do you market/attract pts to this model, particularly since you are not getting any referrals from insurance companies?

  5. I just bought your book on Amazon, do you have any other resources you recommend?

Here’s my response:

all of these questions are answered in the book :) 

1.) We asked Quest over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for better prices until they caved

2.) We get low cost meds via ANDAmeds, we get low cost imaging via Regional Medical Imaging

3.) We aim for 500 patients per doctor 

4.) We attract via social media and SEO

5.) read the Startup DPC book! and check out our courses on www.StartupDPC.com - the Sales Funnel Course will be especially helpful for you!

- Paul 

Seriously, you have to call Quest over and over and over and over and over again until you get through to the right person. BUT you don’t have to have amazing prices to start. You can get decent prices or start without offering labs, and then just layer on better and better services and better prices as time goes on. Your Direct Primary Care practice doesn’t have to be perfect from day 1, you just have to continually strive to improve it with each day, week, month, and year, and THEN you’ll have an amazing practice and business.

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Are Dachshunds the Unofficial Mascot of the Direct Primary Care Movement?

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Maybe this is the pandemic fatigue talking, but perhaps Dachshunds are the perfect dog breed for an aspiring Direct Primary Care doctor. Perhaps I’m biased, as we have three dachshunds in our family, but I got an amazing email from an aspiring DPC doctor this week that may make the case for dachshunds as the unofficial mascot of the DPC movement.

Here’s our guy, Mr. Fritz, reading his copy of Startup DPC. Fritz is courageous, loyal, and always does the right thing - great qualities for a DPC doctor as well!

According to the internet, the dachshund, is also known as the wiener dog, badger dog, and sausage dog. It’s a short-legged, long-bodied, hound-type dog breed. The Dachshund is described as clever, lively, and courageous to the point of rashness. They’re bred for perseverance, which is another way of saying that they can be stubborn. Dachshunds have a reputation for being entertaining and fearless, but what they want most is to cuddle with their people.

Whenever people pick up a course via our Startup DPC website, I always send a thank you note via email. This time, I got the most delightful response:

Thanks Paul. Not sure if this is an automated email but got your book last year- really well done. Saw you had a dachshund. Here’s a pic of mine reading your book.

Here’s Bella reading Startup DPC - dachshunds are loyal, clever, and lively!

Well, obviously this blog post is just for fun - send your pic of your dog reading a copy of Startup DPC, and we’ll feature them on the next post!
Have a great week,

-Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC

PS. Our Startup DPC book just hit 92 five star reviews on Amazon! Here’s the latest review:

I cannot express enough how helpful this book has been for me and my future plans as a DPC physician. Dr. Thomas explains simply and clearly the steps you need to successfully understand the ins and outs of a DPC practice. Super glad I found and read this book! 10/10 recommend

Our most recent review for the Startup DPC book.