What Is a Direct Primary Care Membership?
The model that makes better medicine possible.
A Different Way to Pay for Primary Care
Most people have never questioned how primary care works -not the medicine itself, but the system behind it. You get sick, you call your doctor, you wait, you spend seven minutes in a room, you get a prescription or a referral, and you leave. You pay a co-pay. Your insurance pays the rest. Repeat.
That model is not broken by accident. It is the predictable result of a payment system that compensates providers for the volume of patients they see not the quality of care they deliver. The more patients a practice bills, the more it earns. Which means the incentive has never been to spend more time with you. It has been to see more people, faster.
Direct Primary Care — DPC — is a fundamentally different model. And it changes everything downstream.
How Direct Primary Care Works
In a Direct Primary Care practice, you pay a simple monthly membership fee directly to your care team. There is no insurance billing for primary care visits. No co-pays. No prior authorizations. No claim forms. No insurance company standing between you and your provider deciding what care you deserve and how long your appointment can last.
In exchange, you get something most healthcare cannot offer: unlimited primary care, direct access to your provider, and a relationship built on time instead of transactions.
At Integrative Family Medicine, individual memberships start at $110 per month. Business memberships — for employers who want to offer this benefit to their teams — start at $105 per employee per month.
A one-time $80 enrollment fee applies. That is it. No surprise bills. No co-pays at visits. No guessing what your care will cost.
What Your Membership Includes
And how it will change the way you experience primary care
Unlimited primary care visits
See your provider as often as you need to — for acute illness, chronic disease management, preventive care, follow-up, and everything in between. No per-visit charge. No co-pay.
Same-day and next-day access
When something comes up, you can reach us. We offer same-day and next-day urgent appointments in person, by video, and by phone. You are not competing with hundreds of other patients for an opening three weeks from now.
Direct access to your care team
Text, call, or message your provider directly. Real access — not a phone tree, not a nurse's voice mail not a message that gets answered three days later.
Longer, unhurried appointments
Our appointments run two to three times longer than the national average. Because the quality of care you receive in a conversation that actually has time to breathe is categorically different from one that does not.
Significant savings on labs, medications, and procedures
We have negotiated wholesale pricing on in-house lab work, common procedures, and an extensive medication formulary. Most members save hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per year on these costs alone.
Health coaching
Our health coaches work alongside your provider to support your nutrition, lifestyle, fitness, and wellness goals. This is included in your membership — not billed as a separate service.
Community education and wellness events
Members receive access to our community workshop and education series - talks, panels, and wellness events designed to give you the knowledge and tools to take better care of yourself.
After-hours support
You are not on your own outside of business hours. We provide after-hours support for urgent concerns so you have somewhere to turn before defaulting to an emergency room.
Why This Model Makes Better Primary Care Possible
Our model is about having the time and the relationship to practice medicine the way it was always meant to be practiced. Period.
And time is exactly what the traditional insurance model eliminates.
When a provider is scheduled for twelve-minute appointments across a panel of 2,000 patients, there is no room to ask about sleep. There is no room to discuss stress. There is no room to understand the relationship between a patient's diet and their inflammation, or between their work situation and their blood pressure, or between their childhood and their patterns of self-care. There is only room for the presenting complaint — and the fastest path to resolving it.
Direct Primary Care gives that time back.
Our providers carry significantly smaller patient panels which means they can give each patient more time, more attention, and more of themselves. It means they can actually know you. Not your chart. You.
That is the foundation on which integrative primary care is built. Not a philosophy applied in theory - a practice made possible in reality by a model that creates the conditions for it.
When your provider knows your full history, your lifestyle, your goals, and your stressors, they can do something a seven-minute appointment never allows: they can see the whole picture. And medicine practiced on the whole picture looks completely different from medicine practiced on a symptom.
It looks like noticing that the fatigue you came in about is connected to the sleep disruption you mentioned in passing six months ago -which is connected to the anxiety you normalized -which is connected to the nutritional pattern your health coach flagged.
It looks like catching something before it becomes a problem, because your provider knows your baseline well enough to recognize when something has shifted.
It looks like a plan that is actually built around your life — your values, your capacity, your goals — rather than a protocol applied to your diagnosis.
That is integrative primary care. And it requires this model to exist.
How DPC Works Alongside Insurance
A Direct Primary Care membership is not insurance - and you do not need insurance to join.
For members who do carry insurance, DPC works beautifully alongside it. Use your membership for the 80% of healthcare that happens at the primary care level — routine care, urgent visits, chronic disease management, preventive screenings, labs, and medications. Use your insurance for what it was actually designed for: hospitalizations, specialist care, surgery, and major medical events.
Many of our members pair their IFM membership with a high-deductible health plan (HDHP), which typically carries a significantly lower monthly premium than traditional insurance. In many cases, the combined cost of a HDHP plus an IFM membership is less than what they were previously paying in premiums and co-pays alone — with meaningfully better care.
If you are uninsured, your membership gives you access to comprehensive integrative primary care which covers the vast majority of your healthcare needs at a clear, predictable monthly cost.
Why Employers Choose DPC
For businesses, a Direct Primary Care membership is one of the most impactful investments in employee health available - and one of the most underused.
When your employees have a provider who knows them, they use the healthcare system more appropriately. They catch problems earlier. They spend less time in urgent care waiting rooms. They have fewer unaddressed chronic conditions quietly affecting their energy, focus, and productivity. And they have a benefit that communicates something important: that you take their wellbeing seriously.
Business memberships at IFM start at $105 per employee per month. You receive a simple employer dashboard to manage enrollment, a monthly invoice for active members, and a care team that will show up for your people the way great medicine should.
We are happy to meet with your team, answer questions at an employee information session, and support a smooth rollout. The goal is simple: make it easy for your employees to access the best primary care available — and let us take it from there.
The Membership That Pays for Itself
When you add up the co-pays you no longer pay. The urgent care visits you avoid because you can reach your provider the same day. The labs drawn at wholesale cost. The medications filled at a fraction of retail. The specialist referrals you did not need because a problem was caught and addressed early.
For most of our members, the membership more than pays for itself — in dollars, in time, and in the kind of care that actually moves their health forward.
This Is Healthcare Designed Around You
Not around insurance reimbursement rates. Not around appointment volume. Not around the fifteen diagnoses your provider needs to document to justify the billing code.
Around you. Your health. Your time. Your life.
That is what membership at Integrative Family Medicine gives you. And that is why we built it this way.
We would be honored to be your care team.