Paladina - An Invitation to Join the Conversation

I have been attending every event and reading every article I can find about Direct Primary Care since 2008.  At this point there are is really only one large DPC group of which I continue to remain unfamiliar:  Paladina Health, LLC (owned by DaVita Healthcare Partners, Inc). Paladina appears much larger than the average DPC group, but remains surprisingly quiet within the DPC community.  

To the best of my knowledge they operate mostly on-site employer-focused DPC clinics and choose to employ their DPC physicians directly. This job advertisement highlights panels of 600-800 patients per provider, with 2-3 providers per clinic.  They claim to operate employer-sponsored DPC clinics in 13-15 states.  After reviewing their website I was able to locate 37 clinics across 8 states, and these will be included in the next updated version of the mapper.

The folks at Paladina have been authoring Webinars on their own site (not open access).  At the time of this post, five of their "Health Webinar Replays" are available on YouTube.   The group has a small blog as well.  It looks like they could be aggregating some useful data for the DPC movement, or at least for their own marketing purposes (also not open access).  

So... if anyone at Paladina is reading this - consider this an open invitation to join the DPC community in an active way - consider attending the DPC Summit, supporting the efforts of the DPC Coalition, or publishing your data so that we might add it to our list of academic articles. Some of Paladina's practice locations (those I could find) will be included in next updated version of the mapper, but I would be happy to include a comprehensive list if anyone at Paladina would like that - just send me an email (info@dpcfrontier.com).

Florida's DPC Legislative Efforts Looking Like Sausage

For any readers in Florida, please be sure to support the DPC legislation that has been proposed in the state.  Lee Gross, MD and others (such as Garrison Bliss, MD and the DPC Coalition) have offered helpful support and testimony for the legislation that faces an uncertain future. Unfortunately the legislation is being attached to other pieces of legislation rather than being proposed as a stand alone bill (A stand alone bill would be more likely to pass given the broad support for DPC).  

Congrats to Oklahoma! - State Legislative Review

Wonderful news came out of Oklahoma two days ago.  The OK state became the 10th state to pass DPC legislation.  Congratulations to Rob Bartlett and the many others who worked to make the legislation a priority!  In my opinion Oklahoma has the best DPC legislation to date. Fortunately only two of the ten DPC laws passed to date are examples of "Bad Law" that harmed (more than helped) the DPC movement.

1) West Virginia 2006 (Bad law)
2) Washington    2007
3) Oregon            2011 (Bad law)
4) Utah                 2012
5) Arizona           2014
6) Louisiana        2014
7) Michigan         Jan 10, 2015
8) Mississippi      Mar 18, 2015
9) Idaho               Apr 9, 2015
10) Oklahoma      Apr 21, 2015
 

If you are working on legislation in your state, be sure to keep the rest of the DPC community involved.  Review the Model Legislation promoted by the DPC Coalition.  Reach out to us, the DPC Coalition, or your favorite other supporting organization for assistance. 

If you happen to be located in Florida, Kansas, Missouri, New Hampshire or Texas be sure to follow, weigh in, and support their pending DPC legislation as well.