Marketing Your Direct Primary Care Practice to Employer Groups

Part of growing any small business is identifying your ideal clients. Direct Primary Care practices are clearly set up to serve at the patient level, but many DPC physicians are learning how they can quickly scale their practice by contracting with local employers to offer memberships to their employees. If you are a DPC physician thinking of working with employer groups of any size, this blog post is for you. We hope some of the points will help you navigate the advantages and potential pitfalls of contracting with businesses for your services. Below, we have listed a few things to consider when marketing your practice to employer groups. To get more information on growing your practice and working with employer groups, download our whitepaper.

If you are offering DPC as a stand-alone benefit, make sure you clearly communicate that you are not a replacement for their health insurance.

• Offering DPC as a stand-alone benefit to businesses – especially small ones – can be an amazing value-add for their employees. Employees that have access to direct primary care will have any time access to primary care, and hopefully, all of the care they need can take place in your clinic or virtually. However, you need to consider the way that you position your offering to the enrolling employees. Let’s be honest, many employees don’t pay full attention during their benefit meetings, and if the Direct Primary Care “benefit” is positioned at all like insurance, they may leave assuming that they have full insurance coverage.

DPC integrates very well with health insurance, but your value proposition should change based on the existing benefits structure.

• Before approaching a business, consider how they purchase their insurance and learn as much as you can about the plan design before positioning your value. For a small business that does not offer any benefits, you should position your value as a benefit that will be affordable for their employees. Make sure that you have resources available to offer their employees if they ask about purchasing a wraparound insurance policy. This is where having relationships with health brokers can be incredibly valuable. You should also consider recommending that these employees look at health-sharing organizations like Sedera Health Share.
• If you are in conversations with large businesses that are self-funded, your value proposition is much different and should be focused on the cost savings surrounding DPC. Use case studies to show how you can deliver these cost-savings and health outcomes. Keep in mind that larger self-funded plans will have more decision-makers in the process, so you will need to have a smooth transition and employee-education plan to work with HR, a reporting and communication plan with the CEO and/or CFO, and a working relationship with the company’s health insurance broker who is responsible for the overall plan execution. If you can work with all of these key components with larger businesses, your sales pitch will be incredibly strengthened. If you are not a part of a DPC affiliate network like Strada Healthcare, consider joining and leveraging our expertise, technology, and experience to help you work with larger self-funded groups.

Leverage the data you have available

• Primary Care is an investment, and like any investment, businesses who purchase Direct Primary Care to augment their benefits offering and save money on their health plan expect to know how their investment is performing. It is critically important that you leverage all the data at your disposal to track and report on metrics like cost-savings, utilization, and key health outcomes like biometric data. If you are only working with smaller groups, complex data and reporting become less important, but you should still consider providing reports to the businesses to show utilization metrics and employee satisfaction if possible. Strada Healthcare works with KPI Ninja to aggregate and reports on data for our employer groups – both large and small.

Embrace long sales cycles

• One of the benefits of engaging with employer groups is that it can put your practice on a trajectory for exponential growth. However, you will run into more decision-makers along the way which can lengthen the process. Usually, the larger the business, the longer the sales cycle. Embracing this means investing in a good CRM system like Salesforce or Infusionsoft to help you track prospect employer groups. You should have drip marketing campaigns to keep your prospect businesses and brokers updated on your clinic and the trends in DPC, this will help you stay top-of-mind when they are ready to implement DPC.

Join Us In Revolutionizing Healthcare

To read more about marketing your DPC practice, download our recently published whitepaper and consider joining Strada’s Affiliate Network. Whether you’ve been practicing DPC for years or you’re just now thinking about making the switch, our team is dedicated to working with you every step of the way. Contact us to learn more about joining the Strada Affiliate Network.