Concierge medicine, also known as membership-based medicine, has multiple benefits. It offers patients expanded, expedited and more personalized primary care, and gives physicians more time to work with patients while generating an additional, recurring revenue stream for medical practices.
During a March Becker’s Hospital Review webinar sponsored by Concierge Choice Physicians (CCP), Wayne Lipton, managing partner of CCP, discussed how a flexible approach to membership medicine can help practices address challenges related to revenue as well as physician recruitment and retention.
Three key insights were:
- Concierge medicine models can be an attractive service option within a traditional medical practice. The nature of these models — which can be hybrid (serving from a handful to a few hundred concierge patients), full (serving from 100 to 600 patients) or transitional — allows concierge models to seamlessly integrate into vertically integrated health systems. Because hybrid models can be designed and flexibly woven into existing structures, they are not in conflict with traditional referral- and insurance-based models.
“In a hybrid program, the doctor continues to see all of their patients,” Mr. Lipton said. “It does not reduce productivity but rather increases it and the time that doctor is spending with concierge patients is a highly valuable period of time for them.”
- Small, blended programs can add millions of dollars in revenue without the need for any major structural changes. Because hybrid models can be integrated within existing care delivery models as space and staff bandwidth permits, they are not disruptive. Yet, these types of concierge models can be an attractive source of recurring private revenue, similar to a software subscription model.
For example, a medical practice with a hybrid concierge model with 100 members, which charges each member a $2,500 annual fee, can generate an additional $250,000 per year from that revenue stream. For a primary care practice that generates in the range of $800,000 to $1 million per year from government and commercially insured members, that is a significant amount of additional revenue.
“CCP can make appropriate recommendations as to what price point makes sense for each practice, based on market conditions, the patient population and to some extent the nature of the current practice,” Mr. Lipton said. He founded CCP 20 years ago, at the dawn of concierge medicine, to support physicians who are interested in offering such services.
- Provider organizations see concierge medicine as a key to physician retention and recruitment. The flexibility of concierge models can help organizations counter physician burnout, which is due in part to demanding fee-for-service environments that incentivize physicians to see high volumes of patients.
With a concierge model, doctors can slow down the pace of their practice, even if only for a portion of their day, which can improve physician satisfaction and increase retention. This is of particular importance to many older, more experienced physicians. The idea of concierge medicine could lead some of these more senior physicians to delay retirement so they can continue to see patients at a slower pace and have more time to mentor younger colleagues.
For these same reasons, concierge medicine can serve as an effective recruitment tool for new physicians. “Concierge medicine is an excellent way to improve physician retention and recruitment because it is a desirable way to practice,” Mr. Lipton concluded.
