Though your insurance will not be billed for office visits (these will all be covered under your membership fee), you will need your insurance to cover labs/imaging/specialist visits. Your insurance will need to allow for out of network doctors to order labs/imaging and place referrals (or more commonly not require insurance referral to see specialist). Typically PPO style plans don't require in network doctors and HMO style plans do. In most cases PPO style plans will work best with DPC. Medicare does have a provision that will allow out of network doctors to order and refer. Please make sure that if you have a Medicare supplement that it does not require in network doctors to orders or refer (PPO and Medex style plans work best).

Ask your employer! Your employer determines how FSA and HSA money is spent. Remember to mention to them that Rhythm Direct Primary Care membership is not an insurance.

Nope! Your membership fee covers all of your visits. No out of pocket charges of any kind ever for visiting with me

As many as you need.

Yes, you will have access to me 24/7. Email is my preferred communication method for non urgent matters which will be addressed the next business day. For any urgent matters, you can call or text me.

Most days if you book online or call before noon, I will have same day appointments. If not, you will definitely have appointment the next day. If you don't see an appointment available on the online scheduler, just send me a text and I will find you a spot that works for you.

Yes. Just as they always have, they can send me notes from your visits via electronic fax. I will also have time to take their call if we need to speak over the phone or to initiate a call to them. You can use specialists from any hospital group or independent practice that you would like. I can help you find the right specialist for you.

No, please get your vaccinations at your local pharmacy.

Yes, you can choose whether you want to be billed annually or monthly. If you pay annually, you will receive a 10% discount.

Yes, see our rates for individual vs couple vs. family.

I will send you an email the week before I have a planned vacation to let you know that I will be out of the office. While I'm on vacation you can still contact me for urgent matters. Everything that we can handle remotely, I will. I will be checking my email and business phone once in the morning and once in the early evening everyday on vacation. If you need to be seen in person while I am on vacation, this would be one of the rare times that you would need to go to an Urgent Care. This, honestly, is not really different than when how it is with your insurance based care - most often the covering doctor would be sending you to the urgent care as well.

As a primary care physician I will always focus on your immediate need. But with the additional time I get with you and the faster I appointments that I can provide, I can always combine preventive care while following up on your acute condition and get you to a better place much more effectively than your typical insurance based primary care.

The key reason I am able to do this is by removing inefficiencies from the system.

In your insurance based model, your typical salaried PCP has a patient panel of about 2500 patients. The insurance based business model forces the PCP to see about 20 patients a day in 8 hours so that each PCP can make about 5 times their salary as profits for the enterprise. While this is highly profitable for the enterprise, this model of care leads to the difficulties in getting appointments in time, delay and wait times during appointments, not being able to see your own physician because he/she is booked way far in advance and getting only 12 minute average face time with your physician and only enough time to discuss a specific case with your physician. If you have to discuss multiple issues, as is common with the nature of health and wellness, you have to book another appointment. This system makes primary care unattractive to patients and professionally unsatisfying to the primary care physician. Significant burn out of physician happen due to this practice which affects the quality of care patients receive and has led to the shortage of primary care physicians which in turn has aggravated the problem further in a vicious cycle.

I will limit my panel of patients to 400 (about a fifth of the size of the patient panel of insurance based PCP) which will allow me to see on an average 5-6 patients in an 8 hr day. This will allow me to devote nearly an hour to you if needed and together we can decide what we need to talk about and what we need to address- without constraints from some distant insurance administrator interfering in your care. I will have the bandwidth to see you at short notice and additonally, discuss any health matters  of importance to you anytime (24/7). If it is important to you, I want to hear about it at any time of the day.

At Rhythm Medical, I am not obligated to make insurance companies richer at your expense. I can truly care for you.

Let’s begin…