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Primary Care for $20/month and $10 copay - Profitable

14 points by will_brown ↗ HN
Partnering For Community Care, LLC (www.partneringforcommunitycare.com) is a healthcare start-up that I co-founded in June of 2012 with my brother, Dr. James Brown, a family physician. As of this month the start-up has become profitable.

I would like to take credit; however, my brother called me with an idea last year to start a business for the sole purpose of providing low cost primary healthcare through a membership model - so low that uninsured could pay out of pocket and so low that it might be cheaper for insured patients to join than pay their insurance copay. Being uninsured myself this sounded like something that might be appealing for me - now if only someone can figure out low cost ER programs - and so in exchange for my legal services (and continued legal services) I became a co-founder and filed the legal documentation to start running the business.

In order to keep the start-up low cost, we opted not to purchase a brick and mortar location and staff it, but instead we ran the program from my brother's existing office, located in Daytona Beach, Florida. We starting activating members about September-October last year and traction has been great so far with extremely happy members, some patients have come into the office twice already. With a local hotel signing up a number of their employees (for $15/month corporate rate) this month the business officially turned a profit.

At this point we are considering 3 different options: 1. Continue the business from the existing office only, 2. Try to partner with additional primary care offices already in existence, or 3. Begin to open out own brick and mortar Partnering for Community Care branded offices.

Despite being a non-tech start-up I thought HN might appreciate this post, have questions or advice/suggestions.

8 comments

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pulledpork
How do you achieve such low costs?
will_brown
Because we run out of an existing primary car practice. So the one office we have has its own insurred and medicare patients we are just supplimenting their existing (thriving) practice. There has been some canabalization, some of their exisiting medicare/insurred patients signed up for a membership, but the practice doesn't care because billing medicare/insurance is so expensive, they employee 12 people for coding/billing alone.

As of now we split the membership fee and with the office, so our cost is rather limited and does not include any medical personnel salaries. It is yet to be tested whether we can support our own brick and mortar, staff, ect... But we feel those will be profitable with 1000 members per office but our goal is upward of 2000 members per office.

j2bax
That doesn't seem like it would add up for a stand alone office that served only these type of members. 2000 members per office would bring in $40,000/month. Add about 1000 visits (which seems like a lot for an office to handle (32 patients a day)) and that equals an extra $10,000 giving you a total of $50,000 revenue per month. Thats $600,000 a year which doesn't seem like it would go very far with your doctors, support staff, supplies, building etc.

Cool idea, but it seems too good to be true for the consumer as a stand alone business!

will_brown
Your $600,000 per office is suprisingly close to our numbers. However, this will cover over head, 1 doctor, 1 nurse practicioner, and 1-2 office staff. Now the profit is not giant, but what if we can replicate this 50 or 100 times it adds up, and most importantly we will have provided improved access to low cost quality care, which we are currently doing on a small scale and members are loving it.
j2bax
Well that's awesome! I may have over estimated what it takes to run a small doctors office. If you could make this work on a wide scale you truly could make a huge difference in this country. Best of luck!
subrat_rout
There is a similar healthcare start up with branches in California and Nevada with similar pricing model(medlion.com). They charge $59/month per adult, $39/month for senior adults and $19/month for 21 and younger. I hope this model catches on throughout the nation soon. US is in desperate need of some disruptive model in healthcare with more transparent in pricing structure.
will_brown
It is no coincidence that this model is being explored in CA, NV, and FL. I agree it is a great model (some can be expensive) and one that lowers cost by taking insurance and medicare out of the equation. The real problem is this is just a model for primary/preventative care and does not address the high cost of ER and catostrophic care.
subrat_rout
Unless ER and catastrophic care including lab tests go through a radical changes, I doubt US healthcare system is going to change significantly. But still this is a first step towards towards a bigger goal. At least people will be able to afford some primary visit and preventative care.