First State Direct Primary Care is on a mission to restore the doctor-patient relationship and offer affordable and accessible health care in Delaware. Let me start telling you what we’re about by answering a simple question:
What is direct primary care?
Direct primary care is a model of healthcare where patients contract directly with a physician or physician office for primary care services. The patient’s insurance is not billed for services performed in or by the office, including office visits, telehealth visits, and most in-office procedures. This also allows most direct primary care practices to offer access to whole-sale medications, as well as at-cost labs and imaging, oftentimes for up to 80-90% savings. By not contracting with insurance companies, this brings greater decision making ability to both the physician and patient (how many times have you been at a doctor’s office and before even thinking about a treatment they make a statement like, “well this is what your insurance will cover“?).
In direct primary care, if you have insurance we recommend you keep your insurance coverage, but instead of becoming the only way to access and pay for medical care, it becomes a tool – one that is used in the event of a catastrophe such as an emergency room visit, hospitalization, or surgery; in other words, you don’t have to use it for every primary healthcare service that you get - oftentimes when you pay directly for primary care services, they become quite affordable. I want to be clear, direct primary care is NOT insurance and I would never recommend for any patient to drop their insurance coverage, but after seeing how affordable primary healthcare is without having to go through your insurance for every service, you might rethink how you utilize insurance and what insurance coverage is best for you.
Interested in learning more about our practice? Visit First State Direct Primary Care at www.firststatedpc.com. Or if you are ready to take the next step in your health journey by becoming a member of our practice, we are pre-enrolling patients prior to our opening in September - you can join here.
-Dr. Aaron