A fee-per-visit health clinic is opening to Phillips on July 8th.
Taylored Family Care Clinic uses a different financial model for their services so that they can provide quicker, more affordable, and more accurate care.
Headquartered in Medford, the providers at Taylored Family Care Clinic all came from large healthcare systems, where patient care was constantly complicated by billing and insurance problems.
Jake Brehm, Director of Operations, says they’re trying to change the way healthcare is offered by eliminating the need for insurance altogether.
“What we've done is we've eliminated all the middlemen in the expenses that are associated with billing insurance positions, such as prior auth, specialist, rev cycles, denials, teams, things like that, and really changed the equation to go provider to patient rather than provider to insurance needs to patient,” he explained.
He says that they’ve been able to improve access.
They don’t have to rely on insurance volumes to support their overhead, because they simply don’t have it.
“So we're able to get patients in quicker, same day, following day for acute needs, we're able to spend more time with patients,” he said.
Prices are available for all visits that they offer on their website and Brehm says that they really want patients to be able to know how much a visit will cost before they come in.
Brehm said that one local company partnered with Taylored Family Care Clinic and saved their employees $441,000 for family and primary care needs.
That’s in part thanks to a 2021 bill called the Health Care Price Transparency Act that forced healthcare systems to post their pricing publicly.
“I'm able to compare all the costs that these companies are spending on health plans by partnering with clinics similar to ours rather than going through the systems. So while we don't bill insurance, every visit that we have here does have a correlated CPT code or diagnosis code,” explained Brehm.
“And from an affordability standpoint, those employees don't pay a penny to come here, they partner with us, their employers partner with us and their employees here, employees get it for free, we bill it back to the company because the companies are saving that much on the top end,” said Brehm.
The clinic is open to anyone, individuals or businesses.
At the Phillips locations, they’ve hired local nurse practitioners and Brehm says they’re excited about partnerships with businesses and other groups in Price County.
While fee-per-visit independent clinics offer a potentially effective alternative to regular insurance-based providers, they’re sometimes limited by the fact that, at the end of the day, they’re still a small business and have financial restrictions.
They can’t afford to also offer in-house physical therapy and occupational therapy, for example.
Brehm says that a lot of folks from Phillips and more northern locations were traveling to their Medford clinic for care and that this new location will have a big impact on the healthcare infrastructure of Price County.
The clinic will open July 8th in the former Flambeau Home Health and Hospice office at 133 N. Lake Avenue.
