Enabling the Expansion of Direct Care Benefits for Employers and Their Employees
The Employer Coalition for Direct Care is a nonprofit organization dedicated to enabling the expansion of direct care benefits programs for employers and employees.
Working with stakeholders across the entirety of the healthcare benefits spectrum, we seek to remove barriers that currently prevent many employers from sponsoring these innovative benefits programs for their employees. In doing so, we hope to make it possible for more Americans to enjoy greater access to affordable, high-quality care through emerging payment models like direct primary care (DPC).
What is Direct Primary Care?
Direct Primary Care (DPC) or “Direct Care” is a payment model offering physicians and other healthcare providers an alternative to traditional fee-for-service billing. Under a typical direct care arrangement, patients are charged a flat periodic fee that covers a set of defined services. Fees for these services are paid directly to the healthcare provider instead of being billed through a third-party payer.
Direct care arrangements foster stronger relationships between patients and providers, emphasize and reward quality of care delivered versus volume of services billed, and reduce the overhead cost and administrative inefficiency associated with fee-for-service billing.
How Do Employers Benefit from DPC?
As healthcare costs continue to rise, employers who are committed to offering their employees affordable, attractive healthcare benefits are seeking new solutions that can help control costs and manage risk without sacrificing quality of care.
Enter Direct Primary Care: a new model for obtaining and paying for healthcare services that offers enhanced access to high-quality care for employee-patients, while helping employers manage costs through reduction in claims expenditures and improvement in wellness outcomes over time. When offered as an integrated component of an employer-sponsored benefit plan, DPC can reduce costs to the plan by as much as 30 percent, while offering employees access to exceptional care from a dedicated healthcare provider.
How Do Employees Benefit from DPC?
DPC gives employees and their family members dedicated access to a primary care physician focused on their unique healthcare needs, free to spend more time with their patients because they spend less time dealing with the paperwork and hassles associated with fee-for-service billing. When offered in conjunction with a major medical plan, DPC is a cost-effective way to manage everyday healthcare needs while remaining protected against low-probability, high-risk healthcare events.
How Do Employees and Their Families Access and Pay for a Direct Primary Care Membership?
How do Employees and their Families Access and Pay for a Direct Primary Care Membership? The majority of employers that offer a DPC benefit to employees will subsidize most if not all of the membership fees for employees and their family members.
This is why we are passionate about removing barriers to the expansion of DPC and similar models for the employer market: because it means that more American employees and their families will get to enjoy a better healthcare experience.