Direct Primary Care: Niche Marketing for a Small Practice

OK, you read about my listing with the Physician Hospital Alliance that we are taking patients without insurance (or are willing not to use their insurance in our practice).  We got about six calls in three weeks, half of which were insured and wanted to use it in our practice.  DPC is sometimes hard for people to understand when they're used to the traditional medical insurance that includes family physicians.

Remember, we have about two hundred total patient slots to use for enrolling DPC families.  We're a two physician, independent practice.

Next we'll market to a health food store where a lot of their customers are less prone to go to physicians for minor problems.  The clerk at the cash register understood DPC instantly.  "I just have medical insurance for hospitalization and disasters requiring emergency care," she noted.  "Your membership practice sounds like a great idea.  Can you give us some of your cards?"

It's nice to be understood.  We have the only practice in our city accepting uninsured patients, and they're not pouring in.  Because they don't know.  Yet.

We'll also market to the local urgent care, owned by the hospital system that we relate to.  Then we'll see where the callers learned of us.

Our strength/limitation is that we only take families (households) so we get 2 to 4 new patients per enrollment.  Costs for our subscription practice are $80 to enroll, $60 at the end of each month, and $20 per visit for adults.  Children pay less, seniors 65 and older pay more.  Patients also pay for labs that are sent out of the office and imaging.

After the health food store and the urgent care center, we'll market to one or two religious groups.  They may have uninsured or underinsured persons in need of medical care.

More later.