143 - Health Insurance Is Bleeding Small Employers—Here’s How DPC Physicians Can Help Save Them

Rising insurance premiums are crushing small businesses in your community — are you, as a DPC physician, missing the chance to help and grow your practice at the same time?

In this final episode of our DPC series, I’m diving into one of the most powerful—but overlooked—growth strategies for DPC physicians: partnering with small employers. If you’ve been following the series, you already understand what DPC is, how to market it, how to scale it, and the legal guardrails to keep in mind. Now, it’s time to wrap things up by showing you where the real leverage is—employers who are desperate for cost-effective healthcare solutions.

• Learn how to present your DPC practice as a smart alternative to expensive health plans.
• See why small employer contracts can jumpstart your membership growth almost overnight.
• Discover resources and platforms that help you connect with employers fast—without becoming a full-time salesperson.

Hit play now and let’s close out this DPC series with the strategy that could future-proof your practice and make you indispensable to your local business community.

Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans.

Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:00.15)
In today's episode, you're going to learn and understand what DPC practices can do for small employers as we really enter a new phase in healthcare in America. Welcome back to another episode where I help younger physicians decrease stress and increase income by transitioning from corporate to independent practices, even without any business experience. So in this episode, you're going to learn the DPC employer relationship and how that matters in growing your DPC practice.

the benefits of that relationship and the resources that are out there to help you understand how to manage that relationship. Welcome to another episode of the independent physicians blueprint with your host coach JPMD. That's me. And I'm here to continue the series on, DPC practices. And, this is the last of the episodes on direct primary care and, and, episode one 34, we defined it one 36. We talked about marketing and in episode one 39.

We talked about growing a DPC direct parent care practice. And in episode 141, we talked about some of the legal aspects in direct primary care and how to stay ahead of the legal issues that you might be facing. So why am I doing this? Well, I'm doing this because I think there's a trend out there and I wanted to release this series to help physicians understand.

If you're looking to start a practice independent of corporate controls and independent of hospitals and, you know, these are some of the resources that I like to share with my, my listeners and I hope you're enjoying it. And so we're going to dive right into the episode and talk about the DPC physician provider relationship and the employer with the employers. So one of the things that, that

DPC practices can do for employers is help lower the insurance costs that they're paying. And every year, small businesses, particularly businesses with less than 50 employees will have their insurance premiums increase. Rising costs of drugs, rising costs of treatments, surgeries, all of these contribute to increasing premiums. And it's hard to keep up. And sometimes small businesses are actually not providing any

Coach JPMD (02:23.308)
insurance to their employees, which, which could be a problem. We'll talk about some of the benefits, but you know, some of the things that DPC providers can help small employers with is drug screens and helping them with preventative care. you know, as we learned in episode 141 and episode with Lee Gross, HSA and FSA dollars are now able to be used to cover the costs of direct primary care practices. So

those are some the things that employers need to know. Because in addition, you can also lower your insurance costs as far as employers concerned by adding a direct primary care practice with a high deductible plan or an indemnity policy. Those policies are usually cheaper or less expensive than the traditional insurance is provided by Blue Cross Blue Shield, Humana, Edna, Cigna.

And so one of the things that employers are going to be looking for in 2026 in the US is a way for them to lower the costs by using a direct primary care office. So that's something that direct primary care physicians need to be aware of because that's coming. It's coming soon. The second thing that I want to talk about is benefits. Benefits to both the employer and the direct primary care practice.

So one of the things that employees look for is, are the benefits that are offered by the, by their jobs. And if you don't have insurance or you don't offer insurance, you may lose that employee to another company that might be providing that benefit. So it helps with employee retention and helps with also helping decrease sickness. And if they're the

the employee has a primary care doctor that they can see same day next day, they may be healthier. That will help the employer to keep them healthy and working. Now, as far as the DPC is concerned, the benefits to the Derek Primary Care Practice is that there is a quick jump in their membership. So as you're growing your practice, if you have an employer that signs up 20, 25, 30 patients,

Coach JPMD (04:47.128)
that will help them grow their membership very quickly. Once those employees are with you in your dark primary care practice, then word of mouth kicks in. And if you do a good job and you provide a great service, then that word will spread and that will increase your membership as well. Another great thing is, from what I can tell, and as far as, you know, from what we do in managed care is receive a cap check every month. And in this case, if you contract with an employer,

and provide services for their employees, that employer will be paying you on a monthly basis for your services. So that is a great benefit to the to the practice. And the third thing I to talk about is resources. So we talked about a lot about resources that are online, obviously, now we have chat GPT that can tell you what the resources are for dark primary care. But, you know, based on my research and what I've seen out there,

There's a company called health hint health, and they have a community and as well as softwares and services that can help you grow your direct parent care practice and connect you with employers as well. So they have a whole employer network. And so that's one way of doing it. And there's a buddy of mine who used to work with us as a hospitalist in Spring Hill, Dr. Beinhauer. He actually owns a app Ali and Apple is another connector.

of employers to direct primary care or advanced primary care practices in the Tampa as well as well as I think they're nationwide as well. So if you're looking to grow your practice using employers, then that's one way of growing your practice quickly using appellee and I'll have those resources at the end of the show notes. So those are the three things I want to talk about related to employers and growing your DPC practice. There's

you know, the benefits to the employer and the employee are key. Then you have, you know, the relationships that you develop with them will help you grow your practice. And then how do you grow your practice through the resources that are available online? there's some new companies that are coming out that are going to integrate telehealth, with employers and, and, DBC practices. So look out for that in, my show notes. And if you want to hear,

Coach JPMD (07:14.92)
anything else about direct primary care or think you have benefited from this, leave me a text in your podcast app. If you go down, scroll down in the description, you'll have a link to a text that will get you directly to the show and tell me what you think. We'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you'd like to hear more, subscribe, follow your favorite podcast app so you'll never miss an episode.