While primary care is critical for people in all age groups, there are some potent benefits that are specific to senior citizens and near-seniors. Those benefits are often enhanced when experienced through a Direct Primary Care clinic. For senior and near-senior patients, Direct Primary Care settings can offer more individualized attention, improved care coordination, and greater cost control. This can help seniors better address and manage their health and wellness concerns as they age.
Seniors who receive high quality primary care in a Direct Primary Care setting may experience lower rates of hospitalizations and lower risks of complications. This can help make their golden years healthier, happier, and more enjoyable.
Benefits for Seniors Citizens in Direct Primary Care Practices
At Progressive Health Primary Care, 22% of our patients are over the age of 65 and 27% of our patients are between the ages of 51-64. That’s nearly half of all of our patients! Under our Direct Primary Care model, these seniors experience a wide variety of health-related benefits, including the following.
Seniors Receive More Attentive Care
Most seniors have more healthcare needs than younger individuals. To some extent, that’s just a natural part of aging. Because they emphasize lower overall patient totals and more time spent with patients, Direct Primary Care clinics are well suited to providing seniors with longer, more in-depth primary care visits. In other words, seniors at a Direct Primary Care clinic generally receive more attention. This can make a difference in several ways:
- Preventative care: It’s never too late to practice excellent preventative care. For seniors, a robust approach to preventative care can make the aging process smoother, easier, and more enjoyable. Additional attention at a Direct Primary Care clinic can help ensure preventative care is more comprehensive and effective.
- More communication with your physician: At a Direct Primary Care clinic, seniors will have the opportunity to spend more time with their primary care doctor during appointments. They will also be able to schedule followups sooner (sometimes as soon as the next day with some Direct Primary Care clinics). Additionally, telehealth and email communication options may also be more openly available.
- More complete monitoring of health conditions: Seniors may have more health conditions to monitor and more medications to balance on a daily basis. Having a primary care physician who is familiar with your care (and your medications) can be critically important. Spending more time with your physician gives them an opportunity to become more familiar with your healthcare needs. This can be especially beneficial for seniors.
Direct Primary Care Physicians Can Follow You Where You Live
Some seniors stay in the same place all year. Others may take advantage of retirement to do some traveling. Perhaps you’ll go somewhere warm in the winter. Or you want to trek across Europe for a few weeks. All of this travel can make it difficult for the average senior to keep up with healthcare needs (and may, in some cases, necessitate traveling back to a home state just for an appointment).
However, with Direct Primary Care, insurance restrictions don’t impact where and when you can receive care. This means that you can visit your Direct Primary Care physician in person when you’re in your hometown and schedule telehealth visits when you’re traveling. In this way, Direct Primary Care can make it easier for senior citizens to schedule appointments no matter what their travel schedule looks like.
Your Direct Primary Care Doctor Can Coordinate Your Care
Seniors often need care from a wide variety of specialists. An involved primary care physician can help you coordinate that care. This coordination is essential to ensuring that you get what you need when you need it and, for example, that procedures are not repeated or harmful. For example, in our practice some of our patients also see cardiologists. We have the time to discuss ongoing concerns with them, and they with us, so that together we each have a better overall picture of our patients’ health. if you need to undergo an MRI, your primary care physician can provide a referral and help you interpret your results within the broader context of your overall health and wellness.
This can help reduce your need for expensive specialist appointments because your Direct Primary Care physician knows your full health “story”–and keeps it in one place. This means you may not need specialist appointments for routine care or for issues that are easily explained by your health story.
Reduced Costs
While outcomes are always the number one priority, it’s nearly impossible for patients to ignore the costs associated with their healthcare. Direct Primary Care can help seniors control costs associated with their care in a number of ways:
- Minimizing downstream costs: Studies have shown that attentive primary care can help reduce downstream costs. This can occur for many reasons, but consider: attentive primary care can catch problems early, before they require hospitalization. Since no hospitalization is necessary, you don’t have to pay huge hospital bills. Because you’ll have the opportunity to spend more time with your physician at a Direct Primary Care clinic, you’re more likely to experience these minimized downstream costs.
- Savings on medications: You may require an increasing amount of medication as you age. The medications you receive through your Direct Primary Care clinic may be significantly less expensive than those received through other pharmacies. This is certainly the case at Progressive Health Primary Care, where patients receive discounted prescriptions as a benefit of being a member.
Take a More Active Role in Your Healthcare
Getting your primary care at a Direct Primary Care clinic gives you greater agency over your healthcare journey. By providing more robust care, more time with your primary care doctor, and greater cost savings, Direct Primary Care is a significant benefit to seniors and near seniors.
Discover how Direct Primary Care can work for you by contacting Progressive Health Primary Care today.