FAQ

At Embrace, we take time to develop personal relationships with each of our patient members. As a result, when you need us, you know how to contact us, and we respond. We are a hassle-free direct primary care clinic ungoverned by health insurance or corporate care restrictions.

DPC has been around since the early 2010s, enabling us as physicians to have protected time to be the quality doctor we want to be for our patients. To sustain a conventional insurance-based medical office, a physician must see up to 35 patients daily to cover operating expenses and earn a paycheck. The DPC model is lean, with a straightforward business model and a small medical team; it is sustainable and independent of health insurance.

History shows that DPC patient members have fewer emergency department visits, fewer specialist visits, fewer surgeries, fewer hospitalizations, and fewer prescription medications. Doesn’t that sound appealing?

Committing to having a personal physician is a big decision. Consider your monthly cable TV/internet costs, cell phone bill, or dining expenses. How an individual spends their money is a personal decision and reflects their priorities.

If you are still determining how having a medical home in Embrace benefits you, please call our office. We would be honored to welcome you for a ‘meet and greet’ to get acquainted and help you weigh your pros and cons.

To survive conventional insurance-based medical practices, many physicians have been bought up by larger health systems that receive higher reimbursement rates from insurance companies. As a result, many expensive layers within corporate care are unessential. They also tend not to protect or uphold the value of the patient-physician relationship. Removing interference (insurance companies and hospital system-run primary care offices) reduces primary care costs.

Examples of why conventional care is expensive:

1. Insurance companies and hospital systems dictate the type of care doctors can give and how many patients they need to see.
2. Some insurance companies have copays for each office visit.
3. The cost of medical billing may exceed the actual bill.
4. Hospital administrators are highly compensated.

DPC offices, like Embrace, provide the physician freedom to serve patients and practice medicine as we were trained. In addition, without third-party billing (insurance utilization), our office has a small team, less overhead, and thus more direct time to spend with our patients.

In times of uncertainty, we encourage our patient members to reach out to us right away so we can exercise our medical expertise paired with our pre-existing knowledge of our patients. We advocate for our patients and help them navigate the most appropriate next step in their medical care plan. We strive to avoid hospital-based services safely and responsibly.

With that stated, none of us are equipped to anticipate all of our future medical challenges nor how they will affect our families. With this in mind, at Embrace, we recommend patient membership sooner. We have limited patient capacity to protect access to our existing medical family. We prioritize the importance of a strong and trusting patient-physician relationship and aim to establish this before a medical crisis.

At Embrace, specifically for individuals without insurance or seeking to change their approach to health coverage, we are happy to introduce you to complimentary pairing options to broaden your healthcare coverage beyond the scope of our primary care. High deductible or catastrophic plans work well with DPC practices.

In conventional healthcare, most people are accustomed to paying for their primary care through insurance on a visit-to-visit basis. The problem is that most primary care is patient-clinician dialogue, and it’s hard for insurance companies to know how to reimburse a conversation. This forces physicians to make you schedule an appointment each time you want to speak with them. Recently, physicians must see upwards of 35+ patients a day to keep their practices solvent.

At Embrace, we are free to dialogue whenever, wherever, and however long the patient may need at no extra cost. This significantly increases the quality of the patient-physician relationship. So much so that in one study, patients in a DPC membership model experienced:
● 40% fewer ER Visits
● 54% reduction in ER costs
● 24% fewer Hospitalizations

*Society of Actuaries, 2020

Embrace is an ideal medical home for the Medicare or Medicaid patient who values having unlimited access to a primary care physician that knows and cares about them. Medicare and Medicaid patients pay a monthly membership directly to Embrace, like all patient members.
Embrace can act as your advocate regarding specialists, tests performed outside of our office, and hospitalizations. In addition, Medicare or Medicaid may cover lab or imaging services we order when completed by an independent affiliate.

Membership dues are typically compliant with flexible spending [FSAs] and health reimbursement accounts [HRA], and generally considered compliant with health spending accounts [HSAs]. For more information: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-publication-502