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What are your thoughts on a membership model for a functional medicine clinic? Pros and cons?

Dr. Amy Nett: The first thing that comes to my mind, when I think of a membership model, it depends a little bit what you mean by this, but one thing you can almost think of is like a concierge-type service where patients pay a set amount per year, and then they can schedule as many appointments and that sort of thing. You might want to clarify this for Chris as well so that he is clear on what that membership includes because if you have patients paying a flat fee, and then they can schedule appointments whenever they want, I would worry about that a little bit. I have some patients who they schedule a lot, a lot of appointments. I think having a sort of fee for service in a way, like you pay per appointment, you make sure that that time is well spent because probably all of us have a lot of patients and almost a wait list, and it’s difficult to fit everyone in. I think just in terms of prioritizing it, because people then have to pay per appointment, it helps to figure out who is getting seen, and it really does tend to be more urgent people are going to get in sooner and that sort of thing and more regularly when they need to. I would worry a little bit about how you’re going to sort of monitor the number of appointments people have.

 

The other thing to think about is appointment cancellations if it’s a membership model rather than paying per appointment. We have a cancellation policy, and if patients cancel, I think our cancellation policy we recently changed to like two days. If you don’t cancel within two days, you get charged 50 percent for the first cancellation, and you get charged the full fee for the second cancellation and ongoing. It can be difficult to fill a spot within 24 hours. Again, we’ll leave that question for Chris, but Mark, you may want to clarify a little bit more specifically if I missed the base on what you mean by a membership model. You might want to clarify a little bit more.

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