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Comment by pulledpork | Hacker News Reader

How do you achieve such low costs?

Because we run out of an existing primary car practice. So the one office we have has its own insurred and medicare patients we are just supplimenting their existing (thriving) practice. There has been some canabalization, some of their exisiting medicare/insurred patients signed up for a membership, but the practice doesn't care because billing medicare/insurance is so expensive, they employee 12 people for coding/billing alone.

As of now we split the membership fee and with the office, so our cost is rather limited and does not include any medical personnel salaries. It is yet to be tested whether we can support our own brick and mortar, staff, ect... But we feel those will be profitable with 1000 members per office but our goal is upward of 2000 members per office.

That doesn't seem like it would add up for a stand alone office that served only these type of members. 2000 members per office would bring in $40,000/month. Add about 1000 visits (which seems like a lot for an office to handle (32 patients a day)) and that equals an extra $10,000 giving you a total of $50,000 revenue per month. Thats $600,000 a year which doesn't seem like it would go very far with your doctors, support staff, supplies, building etc.

Cool idea, but it seems too good to be true for the consumer as a stand alone business!

Your $600,000 per office is suprisingly close to our numbers. However, this will cover over head, 1 doctor, 1 nurse practicioner, and 1-2 office staff. Now the profit is not giant, but what if we can replicate this 50 or 100 times it adds up, and most importantly we will have provided improved access to low cost quality care, which we are currently doing on a small scale and members are loving it.

Well that's awesome! I may have over estimated what it takes to run a small doctors office. If you could make this work on a wide scale you truly could make a huge difference in this country. Best of luck!

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