It’s the finale episode of season two! To end things with a bang, we had not one but two special guests: Dr. Chris Larson and Dr. April Calderon of Euphora Health, a direct primary care practice right here in Austin.

Dr. Larson came to medicine after having already started a career in finance. After witnessing the deleterious effects of modern medical practice on relatives and loved ones, he decided to return to school and practice medicine in an alternative fashion. Dr. Calderon’s goal is to help patients find their own path to health. Her professional interests include preventive care, women’s healthcare, pediatrics, and dermatology. Together, this direct primary care power couple is looking first and foremost to improve the lives of their patients, and secondly, to change the healthcare system for the better. 

Our host for this episode, Steven Cutbirth, discusses several topics with Dr. Larson and Dr. Calderon, including the benefits of direct primary care for both patients and physicians, who has the most pull to change the healthcare system in the U.S., where the majority of our healthcare spending goes, and more.

You can listen to the whole episode here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen to podcasts. If you’re short on time, we’ve included a few highlights from our conversation below:‍

Steven: “Well that you guys have both been doing this for a while, how do you compare the two different systems, fee-for-service vs direct primary care? If you think back to what you were doing before, what's the difference in terms of your quality of life? How do you feel like you're able to treat your patients? Are there pros and cons that you've seen in the two different systems?”‍

Dr. Calderon: “I would say there are some significant differences from the doctor's side and from the patient side. But since we're gonna focus on patients, direct primary care really is focusing on patient care and making that your top priority. So really putting patients ahead of everything, including that bottom line. In insurance-based practice, traditionally you're getting a copay and then you're getting a percentage of what you charge. Within that, you're only allotting a certain time because you have to see more and more patients and do more and more, but things get put on the back burner — specifically communication. So people call and they make it an automated system or they may get front staff who don’t really know them or know their care. They may not be able to get that x-ray they wanted because they have to go through a couple of hoops or not be able to go to physical therapy yet because they have to meet certain requirements. So there are just so many barriers that I've found when working in a kind of traditional insurance-based practice that I don’t have with direct primary care. The top things that I see are significant changes in accessibility to patients and communication with patients. In general, that leads to happier, healthier patients and better care. ‍

Steven: “With your practice, do you mostly work with individual patients? Do you partner with employers? We tend to interview and speak with a lot of folks in the insurance, benefits, and self-insured world. So I did want to ask y'all how that worked and who you tend to work with more and what it looks like when you do work with a group. ‍

Dr. Larson: “We work with individuals, and small businesses who have been priced out of the traditional healthcare market for probably a decade. We're talking mom-and-pop restaurants, childcare centers, janitorial services, things of that nature. And then we also work in a more integrated or dovetailed fashion with larger employer groups. And we do that on a kind of brick-and-mortar fashion for those groups that have employees that are close to us. And we can also offer a virtual-only service within the state of Texas for these same employer groups and even individuals. 

My own opinion is that if we really want to try to change the healthcare system, we need to work with those people that hold the purse strings, which, 55% of the healthcare bills in America are paid by employers. And so if we're unwilling to work directly with them, I think that we're going to be hard-pressed to really make any drastic changes. And so I'm willing and openly looking for ways to do that. To this point, really, I have been able to work with only those groups that I would say are at the fringe for one reason or another. Either they have a CEO that's just kind of hard-charging and really wants to optimize everything about their business, including their healthcare plan, or potentially people that are about to be priced out of the health insurance market and they get desperate and are willing to take on a model that others haven't heard about before. And for the small, local businesses, they feel like their employees are their family and so they want to treat those people like family and give them some access to care even if they can't afford the traditional $400 a month in BUCAH insurance. So providing $70 a month DPC, they feel like that's great. The bread and butter for DPC has certainly been working with them.” 

To hear the whole conversation, click here for the full podcast episode. You can also hear more from Dr. Larson and Dr. Calderon by following Euphora health on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and you can visit their website EuphoraHealth.com to learn more about their practice.