How Direct Primary Care Can Save You Money: A Real-Life Example
Well, here we are! I have only two days left as a big health network employee. It is crazy to think that my time with this organization is coming to an end but I am very excited to officially open Simplicity Health Direct Primary Care. We are so excited to be able to offer a revolutionary primary care model to the greater Dayton community— direct primary care.
In Ohio, doctors can dispense medications. We are able to obtain medications at wholesale costs. When you go to a major pharmacy, you pay their operating costs— their electric bills, their security, their employee paychecks. When you get your medications from a direct primary care office, all of these costs are eliminated. Through our membership fee, we can offer several services in our office that you would otherwise have to go somewhere else for— like your pharmacy. Since we are have a limited number of patients in our panel, we have time to fill the prescriptions ourselves and we don’t need to pay extra people or expenses along the way - passing along savings to the patient. It also means one-stop shopping for you.
During one of my final patient encounters at my big health network today, I took the time to go through each medication with one particular patient, as well as the cost this patient pays for these medications at the pharmacy each month. This patient is VERY healthy and only takes a very low-dose blood pressure medication and a cholesterol medication (mostly for family history of cardiac disease). He also has seasonal allergies. His medication list isn’t impressive (at least to me), yet the cost savings per month that I could get him surprised me!
Just to be very transparent, I used GoodRx to find the prices at Walmart for his medications (these prices are listed in the chart below under the “Pharmacy”column). He was actually paying much more at his local pharmacy and the cost savings by getting his medications from Simplicity Health Direct Primary Care paid for his entire monthly membership (over $125/month)! However, even with the figures used below, a Gold Membership would only cost $16/month after subtracting off the $59/month in pharmacy savings. This is not to mention the additional savings (which could be even more significant) we can offer with our prices on labs and imaging.
Check out the chart below:
