COMMUNITY PARTNER OF EVERYDAY WELLNESS
Every other week, Monitor staff writes about a feature article exploring wellness in the Capital Region. We’d like to thank our Community Partner Concord Hospital. Our Community Partners do not participate in the selection of these articles. That is fully at the discretion of our journalists.
Kristy Ammann decided she was through with the traditional healthcare system.
She suffered a tick bite five years ago that swelled in the form of a bullseye and left her with a 102-degree fever. After finding a positive blood test for Lyme disease, doctors put her on a 30-day antibiotic course that made her “very, very sick,” she said.
Amman, who’s 50, said that afterwards she didn’t feel like herself for several months — something more extreme than the premenopause symptoms she expected at her age. Telling that to her primary care doctor yielded little action and even dismissal, so she advocated for a second opinion.
The second doctor examined her and found complications that needed immediate surgery.
“On day two of my recovery, I was like, ‘I’m truly never going back there.’ … I am not going to this healthcare facility,” she said. “I am not doing this again.”
Shopping around for other healthcare providers led her to Origins Direct Primary Care on the edge of Warner’s downtown area — close to where she lived in Hopkinton.
“I can’t believe this person is literally 10 minutes away, and I could have been seeing somebody this whole time,” she said. “It was like a blessing.”
Direct primary care clinics have popped up all over the United States, including New Hampshire, in recent years. Family nurse practitioner Sarah Mullins opened Origins two year ago after a 12-year stint with Concord Hospital.
A defining feature of these clinics — besides unbridled physician access and longer appointments — is the payment model. Typically, patients pay a monthly fee instead of going through insurance, which the clinics do not take.
Ammann said the insurance costs for her family of four were close to $10,000 per year. At Origins, each person pays a total of $1,200 in the year.
“Immediately after my consultation with Sarah, and we came up with a women’s healthcare plan for me and everything, I immediately already felt no issue with knowing that I’m going to pay this monthly fee,” she said. “I have an on-call doctor at all times, or a person, a healthcare professional, at my fingertips at all times.”
Mullins said the model works very well for uninsured patients, and is also beneficial for a majority of people. They are often surprised, she said, by how affordable both the monthly fee — which ranges from $50 to $100, depending on age — and the outsourced screenings and services are combined.
“That’s something that most people aren’t aware of, that it is affordable,” she said. “It is reachable, it is attainable even without insurance.”
Dr. Jack Forbush, a physician based in Maine, started his direct primary care practice 14 years ago when the model was virtually nonexistent. Like other doctors and nurses who make the switch, Forbush had found himself frustrated with traditional healthcare and the convoluted insurance system.
He went on to co-found the New England Direct Primary Care Alliance, which creates a network of clinics to regain the camaraderie and opinion-sharing that larger hospitals incubated.
Forbush said about 80% of his patients don’t have insurance. He explained that direct primary care clinics tend to be more reasonable for those patients than paying out of pocket for services.
“These are people that either didn’t go see a doctor or went and had to pay an exorbitant amount of fee for fairly routine care, and therefore they wouldn’t go,” he said. “Now they have a very reasonable price point to have a family doctor consistently. So, kind of made sense when they started putting two and two together.
Jill Bowyer, another patient at Origins, was somewhat skeptical about the price point. The 53-year-old from New London wondered if paying was worth it if she and her family didn’t need constant care throughout the year. And, she said, “when push comes to shove, are they really going to be that available?”
Those concerns were quickly dispelled once Bowyer started her care.
“It’s just been great,” she said. “I’ll have these weird hour-of-the-day problems, and I can just call her anytime, and she’ll pick up. If I did ever need her to come to the house, I know she’d do it.”
Mullins said she’s developed knowledge and relationships with imaging facilities and independent labs to get the best deals for her patients. She also compares those rates with what their insurance offers — and insurance rates tend to be much higher, she said.
What she like most about her clinic is being able to get to know her patients on a much deeper level. Appointments in the healthcare systems she worked for in the past felt rushed, and now she can spend at least an hour with patients and get the full picture of their care needs.
“I think that really changes the dynamic of that provider-patient relationship, and that’s what I really appreciate, is that you really get to know the whole person, get to work with them on many different areas,” Mullins said. “I like that we don’t have to feel like we have to refer things out because we have the time to work on those things.”
