Q: For the patient, how is getting care from an MDVIP physician different than it might be with a regular primary care physician through a regular insurance model?
Jorgensen: To be clear, MDVIP is not an insurance model.
Q: Right. It’s a supplement to an insurance plan, right?
Jorgensen: Exactly. There are some direct primary care models that do some version of an insurance component. That’s not what we do.
All of our patients continue to have whatever it is they currently have for insurance. For example, we have about 100,000 patients who have Medicare insurance, and it covers hospitalizations and all the typical tests and medications insurance would cover.
To your question of how it differs: The primary foundation of our model is that the member gets a host of non-covered services.
It starts with the annual visit, which includes a comprehensive assessment of their health and a personalized plan that gets formulated based on that wellness exam. Typically, people go to a primary care doctor because they have an issue, they’re sick, or they have some problem. We try to jump ahead of those things through this wellness exam and the plan of care that follows.
In traditional primary care, you have busy doctors with large patient panel sizes who effectively have to triage fairly fast to other procedures, other extenders, or other specialists depending on what’s going on with the patient. It’s all a throughput process that gives doctors a limited number of levers to pull to deal with the financial viability of their practice. They can’t adjust rates, so as a result what they can adjust is the number of appointments a day. Unfortunately, we feel that doesn’t always lead to the best care.
Our doctors have the time for same-day appointments. They have unhurried appointments. Our patients have access to their cell phones, to their emails. It’s a more convenient way to engage with patients to manage their health.
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SOURCE: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2015/06/10/interview-with-mdvip-ceo
