Paladina Health Offers Innovative Care Model to Lower Costs

Steve Adubato goes one-on-one with Matt Weissert, Senior VP of Operations at Paladina Health, to discuss the state of healthcare around the country, challenges consumers are facing and how Paladina's innovative care model is aiming to lower costs for patients.

11/27/17 #2087

Excerpt:

"We are pleased to welcome Matt Weissert, who is Senior Vice President of Operations at Paladina Health. Good see you Matt. Thanks Steve, thanks for having me. What is Paladina Health? Yeah, Paladina Health is direct primary care, but I'll make it simple. Your family doctor. So we have... it's family physicians, but we do it a little bit differently. So we have a membership fee that takes care of all of the costs involved. So a normal physician's office will do a fee-for-service, or they'll... every time you come in, they're going to charge you a copay. Right. And then you're gonna get billed after for anything that's done... You guys don't do that? We don't do that. How does that work? The economic model? Yeah. Yeah, so the way we do it is we go direct to an employer, in this case the state of New Jersey, and they are giving us a membership fee for each one of their employees that choose to join. And then when they do that, they have 24/7 access to their physician, they have same day next day appointments. You know, we have little... no wait time to get in, and then they have a minimum of 30 minute appointments with their physician. And then from there, there's no cost. So they have no copay. And then everything we do inside those four walls, or when they call, we don't charge, we don't bill for it, because the membership fee takes care of it. If someone says, "Hey, come on, that sounds too good to be true!" You say? I say... that's what I usually get. [laughter] They'll say that, like, "What's the catch?" Yeah what is the catch? There really is no catch. So our physicians are... they're employed by us, and they have about a third less of the patients that they would normally have in a, you know, a family physician practice today, in a normal system. So for them, they're able to, you know, spend more time with the patients, spend more time with the families, and make sure they're providing great quality healthcare. That's all their... that's all their job. Now how do you...? I'm curious about this, how do you recruit the docs that you have? Because if someone says, "Well, if I see more patients, I'm making more money..."? Sure. You're saying it's about a third less... Yeah. ...patients? Fewer patients? Yeah. So our physicians, on average, usually have been practicing for seven to ten years. They've been out in the system. They went to medical school to learn how to take care of patients, to spend time with their patients, they get..."