Its an innovative and growing form of healthcare delivery referred to as “Direct Primary Care” where the bureaucracy of health insurance is removed from the doctor-patient realtionship. For an affordable monthly fee, you get direct access to your doctor, with guaranteed same or next day appointments in your home or office, by phone, or video chatting (telemedicine). In this model, your doctor has fewer patients and therefore more time to individualize your healthcare, without the hassles of worrying about insurance approvals, premiums, and copays.
FKCM accepts all patients uninsured, private insurance, and Medicare. We do not bill your insurance company for our home visits, rather our services are paid for by the monthly membership fee that you pay to us directly. We do this for a reason. It lowers our costs, allows us to have a smaller patient panel, removes the middle man, and allows the doctor to customize your primary care needs without having to answer to insurance companies. This takes control of your health away from the insurance company, and gives it back to you! Furthermore, with many insurance plans today, due to high deductibles, patients are paying for their primary care out of pocket already. If you are already paying for it, why not get personalized primary care that comes to you?!
Dr. Keifer retains the ability to write prescriptions for medications, labs, and imaging studies. You can take the prescription to your preferred pharmacy, lab, or imaging center and they will bill your insurance company as usual. We will stock some medications and offer certain testing (i.e. Influenza and Strep testing) and pass them on to you at cost as an added convenience and savings.
Typical Medicare plans offer a very basic level of primary care. The next hurdle is finding a doctor that accepts your plan. Just like our insured and uninsured patients, Medicare patients pay our membership fees directly, giving them unlimited access to Dr. Keifer and all the benefits of FKCM. Your Medicare plan will remain in place for things such as surgeries, hospitalizations, specialists, labs, imaging, and medications.
- Would you prefer being seen in your home or office?
- Do you hate sitting in waiting rooms for hours?
- Would you like to talk directly to your doctor via phone, text, or video chatting?
- Do you have a high deductible insurance plan?
- Are you tired of scheduling an appointment with your doctor only to get there and see a Nurse Practitioner or Physician Assistant?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, our concierge medicines model is perfect for you!
We will keep our practice small so that we can always provide one on one attention to our patients. We will cap our patient panel at a maximum of 300 patients, a typical primary care practice has 3000+. We focus on personalized, preventative health care to keep you healthy. In the event that you do get sick, you have direct access to the doctor via his personal cell phone number and same or next day appointments in your home or office.
In a traditional practice you pay for your primary care indirectly through your insurance company via deductibles and copays. This means, the insurance company gets to decide where you get your healthcare, what services you receive, and what tests can be ordered. WIth our model, if you choose us, you and the doctor will work together to decide what is best for you; without any interference from a third party. In our practice we will limit our patients to a maximum of 200 patients, so we can better serve you. This also means our income is directly dependent upon you. Our contract is for 12 months. If you are unhappy with your service or simply decide to cancel it, you can do so at any time with 30 days notice. No questions asked.
We recommend that you do maintain health insurance but we do not require it. Often times, people who choose concierge medicine for their primary care needs choose plans that have higher deductibles with lower monthly premiums that are designed to cover "catastrophic" events like hospitalizations and surgeries. While we don't endorse any specific company or plan, there are many companies that provide low cost insurance plans for services such as hospitalizations and surgeries. Some even reimburse our membership fees!
We aren't accountants, but there are many online forums that discuss the topic of tax deductions, using HSA, FSA, and HRA accounts, etc to pay for Concierge/Direct Primary Care premiums, fees, and services. Talk to your accountant/tax preparer.
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