In this episode of the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, host Steve Schwartz interviews Dr. Matthew Hitchcock, a successful DPC physician from Chattanooga, Tennessee. They discuss Matthew’s journey from engineering to medicine, the growth of his practice, and the challenges he faced along the way. Matthew shares insights on effective marketing strategies, pricing structures, and the importance of patient retention through word of mouth and social media. He also offers advice for aspiring DPC physicians and discusses the future of the DPC industry.
 

Chapters

 

00:00 Introduction to Direct Primary Care
03:33 Matthew’s Journey to DPC
06:22 Growth and Challenges in DPC
09:22 Marketing Strategies for DPC Practices
12:10 Pricing Strategies and Patient Retention
15:13 Navigating Employer Groups in DPC
18:22 Overcoming Challenges in DPC
21:04 Advice for Aspiring DPC Physicians
24:10 The Future of DPC and Concierge Medicine

 

Steven Schwartz (00:24)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Schwartz. Today, it’s my true pleasure to welcome Matthew Hitchcock from Hitchcock Family Medicine to our podcast. Welcome Matthew.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (00:35)
Perfect. Thank you for having me.

Steven Schwartz (00:37)
Yeah, totally. It’s so nice to get to know you and learn about your success and your DPC practice in Chattanooga, Tennessee. What I’d like to do in our interview today is get a little bit about your background, where you grew up, why you decided to be a doctor, how and what you did before becoming a DPC doc, and then telling us a little bit more about your practice, what you’ve gone through to get there. You’ve had a lot of success. Your practice is growing.

and maybe struggles you went through, challenges. So I wanna get through all that kind of stuff and be able to share the wisdom that you can share with other people who are either struggling in their practices or they wanna grow. Does that sound like a good plan for our agenda? Okay, awesome. Well, tell you what, let us know first of all, where are you from? Where’d you grow up? And what made you wanna become a doctor?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (01:20)
Sounds like a great plan.

Absolutely. So I’m from the Chattanooga area, actually a small town outside of Chattanooga called Dunlap, Tennessee. I actually grew up on a farm, a beef cattle farm. parents still have it. I go shopping in the refrigerator, in the refrigerators for beef for it. I grew up on a farm. I went to school here in Chattanooga to a private school here in Chattanooga and then Clemson University for my undergrad. But I was originally a engineer for my undergrad, but I was working as a firefighter paramedic.

Steven Schwartz (01:40)
Nice.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (01:54)
And it was really while I was doing that, I was like, you know what? I really like this medicine thing. And I don’t really like the engineering thing that I’m during the day. So about halfway through my undergrad, I came to this realization, like, I don’t want to be an engineer. This isn’t what I want to do. I like medicine. So let’s go to medical school, right? So I actually wound up changing my major. I wound up graduating with a degree in microbiology, applied to medical school, the University of Tennessee.

God accepted, but I went to medical school on the Navy’s dime. So I did the HPSP program and had the Navy pay for medical school. When I’m spending 11 years active duty with the Navy and towards the end of my Navy career, I was a faculty physician at a teaching hospital there, Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton in Southern California.

And, you know, we had just had our quarterly coding audit where the, the billers and coders come in and they pick your coding apart and know you should use this code and all this stuff. Uh, we had just done the ICD-9, ICD-10 rollout. I was the chief medical max officer. So that was kind of, I did that. And we got a memo from the command saying, Oh, we’re going to add four more appointments to your day. Cause your access is horrible. Patients can’t get to see you. And I’m looking at my schedule, like, where are you going to add four more appointments? Um, know, 15 minute appointments all day long. And about that time I read a

a

journal article about these two crazy guys in Kansas, Josh Umber, Doug Nunnumaker with Atlas MD and doing the direct primary care practice, know, seeing a handful of patients a day, but no E and M codes, no ICD-10 codes, no CPT codes. And it’s like, you know what? That sounds pretty good. So I tracked Josh’s cell phone down and he was my mentor and helped me open this, um, you know, back in 2015. So we’ve been doing this for 10 years now.

Steven Schwartz (03:33)
What a cool story. And let me say thank you for your service to our country with your time active duty in the Navy. We really appreciate that. Awesome. And I’ll say go Tigers, right? So I was a student at Clemson for a very short time. I loved the school, but it was the wrong program for me. But that’s a different story for a different day. 2015, did you open your doors of your practice?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (03:42)
Thank you.

Go Tigers, there we go.

Ha ha ha.

you

We did open the doors in 2015 for it at the time. was just me. Uh, started off as a solo doc. Um, my wife’s a nurse. Uh, she was my nurse and kind of practice manager helped me out do it. it, um, you know, it took a little time to grow. Uh, and you know, by the end of that first year, we had about a hundred patients. Uh, by the end of the second year, we grew about a hundred a year. It was really about three years in where I was able to quit my.

moonlighting gig with Submergent Cares and jump be full time in the practice there. But once I made that jump around 300 patients, it took off kind of exponential growth from that point. Less than a year later, we were hiring our first additional physician. And then we hired another one shortly thereafter. And we’ve just kind of grown steadily after that.

Steven Schwartz (04:45)
Yeah, that’s awesome. So you hired your second practitioner, you said around year three, year four, something like that?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (04:51)
Hmm.

It was right around year four when we hired Dr. Sanders.

Steven Schwartz (04:56)
Wonderful. And then an

extra physician each year thereafter.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (05:00)
Each year,

pretty after that. And then, had a few in there that kind of moved this for a little bit and then left to go kind of do, go do other things. And I said, right now we’re up to me plus three others. So there’s four total, physicians for my practice right now.

Steven Schwartz (05:13)
Right, and before we recorded our interview, you had mentioned that you had a pediatrician on the team. Tell us that story and what happened and what did you do about it?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (05:15)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we did. So we had a pediatrician join us for a little while there. She was also coming out of the Navy and actually kind of learned it was a little hard to reconcile having a pediatrician and family practice doc just the way the pricing structures worked. Because in general for the family medicine side, you know, we take kids at a discount rate kind of with families with adults to kind of give a family family discount ask. And so we had to kind of modify our pricing a little bit when she came on to kind of make kids be

Adults for pricing to kind of make her pay competitive and it worked for a little while. I she was with us a year and a half, two years. kind of grew. She had about 300 kids, for it. then, you know, got, decided she kind of want to be a stay at home mom with her next kid. And so she kind of took a break from medicine for a little bit, for it. No, I can’t fall. I can’t fall for that at all. Yep.

Steven Schwartz (06:11)
No, that’s awesome. I can’t fault a mama wanting to be home and raising their own baby. no, that’s really cool. So she left the practice and you absorbed

300 kids into your already full panel.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (06:22)
I did.

Yep, I had a full panel at the time and I was the only one that could see kids. I was the only family practice doc. My other physicians at the time were internists. So I had to absorb her 300 kids plus my already full panel, which put me up to about 850 at that time, which was, it was an experience, you know, kind of going through that and trying to still keep that DPC level of care for those patients.

But we survived and we managed and brought another family practice doc on last year. And you’re kind of taking some pressure off of me for that.

Steven Schwartz (06:55)
Right. Well, I mean, obviously the point of DPC or concierge is that you want to have fewer patients paying more per month so that you can have more time to spend with each patient. But when you start getting close to a thousand patients, 900, whatever, there’s only so much time in the day and you don’t want to go backwards on why you’re doing DPC. Now granted, you don’t want to fool with the insurance. get that.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (06:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Steven Schwartz (07:21)
but you want to have the time to spend with each patient who needs you when they need you.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (07:26)
No, absolutely. And at the time too, you know, didn’t want to say, sorry, 300 patients. Y’all just have to leave the practice. You know, we can’t do anything for you. So that was we, and they understood that we, made sure they knew that we were looking for another doc forum and we grow the, the funny thing is after about a year of that, looking for a new doc, you know, very few of them actually went to leave my panel. They’re like, okay, we’ll, we’ll take it. We’ll, just stay with you.

Steven Schwartz (07:46)
That’s cool. In the steady, strong growth that you experienced, what do you attribute maybe your top three methods or reasons that you grew? What worked best for you? And let’s go from there.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (08:02)
Honestly, at the end of the day, think word of mouth from current patients hands down has been our biggest driver of new patients. mean, just today I saw two or three new patient info inquiries and almost all of them said I was referred to your practice by fill in the blank current patient. So I think across the board.

Word of mouth is definitely the most effective new growth strategy for patients. And I think that’s why you reach kind of a tipping point, critical mass of number of patients and the practice just kind of grows exponentially from there because you have enough patients referring other patients to you for it. And hands down, that’s the most effective way. I think follow closely by probably social media has been our number two most effective.

Steven Schwartz (08:46)
Right, and on social media, what

techniques, methods, what are you doing exactly?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (08:52)
Various ones so a mixture of your kind of paid sponsored posts on Instagram and mostly Instagram and Facebook And you know threads a little bit because that kind of jumps in there a little bit now, too And then you know really though. It’s the the organic post that I do that probably drive the most You know impressions if I you know see a kid on a Saturday sewing up their head doing a post about that or you know a new thing that’s happening here doing an organic post on that you know really tends to drive a lot

of engagement and impressions and ultimately people to the practice.

Steven Schwartz (09:26)
Nice. Obviously, part of my business is Concierge Medical Marketing, where we focus specifically on helping concierge and DPC practices with their digital marketing needs to help them grow to whatever panel size they want and to nurture the existing patients so that they renew each year. And we can talk a little bit more about that. In business school and books that I’ve read, they talk so much about the 80-20 rule.

Right. We’ve heard this so many times. And one of the topics of the 80-20 rule is related to pricing for your services. The idea is that if you charge a million dollars a year for your DPC practice per person, no one’s going to pay for it. And if you charge one dollar per year, everybody’s going to pay for it. Right. So there’s some magic number in between a million dollars and one dollar that makes the most sense. And this is where the 80-20 rule comes through.

is that if you say we charge X dollars per month for this service and if eight people say that sounds reasonable and two of those 10 people walk away saying it’s too much, that’s probably a good level. Would you agree?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (10:39)
I think so.

That probably is a pretty good level. And honestly, setting your initial prices is a hard question that I come across with a lot of new docs, you know, setting up their practice, you know, do I just pull this out of thin air? You know, where, where do I come up with this number? And it.

It depends on them. If there’s already established DPCs in your market area, you kind of want to somewhat follow suit. may be able to go a little bit higher, a little bit lower, but you want to kind of be in that same ballpark with them. for me, you know, 10 years ago, I was the first DPC doc in Chattanooga, the first one in Tennessee. So I didn’t have a lot of, you know, other things to kind of copy your kind of go off of, but I did copy and you know, Alice MD and kind of their pricing structure initially with the, age tiered pricing. you know,

I think it was 45, 75 or yeah, 45, 75 and a hundred. But after about that first year, and we actually modified our prices about a year in, because what I discovered was I was very young, family heavy. So I had young adults and kids. And so I had a lot of patients, but I wasn’t really making a lot.

And explaining an age tiered pricing on the phone to a potential new patient was a little complicated. You know, it was hard and we had, well, I’m healthy so I can pay cheaper or, you know, various things in there was really hard. So we, about a year into the practice, we decided just to simplify things. They just come up with a one flat adult rate, one flat kid rate with an adult and just to simplify things. And that was, you know, 10 years ago, we landed on 75 for adults and 25 for kids.

And we’ve had that rate until just this past year when we finally went up on our prices. We did about a 20 % increase on the first of the year for new patients. Kind of grandfather or new patients coming to the practice went up about 20 % to 90 30, 90 30 for them on new patients.

Steven Schwartz (12:28)
Any plans on raising the rates on all of your legacy patients just to help keep up with the cost?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (12:34)
We will, they were

grandfathered in for a year. We kind of gave them a year grandfathered in. And then so on January 1st of 2026, they’ll all go up to kind of the new price structure at that point. And interestingly enough, a lot of DPC docs are worried that they’re gonna lose a lot out of, you know, over just slightly over 2000 patients. We had three families complain about it. So, yeah.

Steven Schwartz (13:00)
And of those

three complainers, did any of them actually leave?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (13:04)
Two did one just said, okay, cause I don’t think she realized that we were, was going to be a year grandfathered in. but yeah, only, you know, two of them quit. we said, you know, the price is going to stay the same for a year, but they still quit anyways. But yeah, we got almost no pushback from the patients when we raised our prices.

Steven Schwartz (13:20)
Right. In my previous digital marketing agency, we made a big increase of rates of the monthly fee and it went up literally $10 a month. So we’re not talking huge numbers and of the hundreds of clients that I had, a couple mentioned it, one complained. And so we said, okay, we’ll keep you at the same rate. Just, you know, and then she stayed and that was that.

And the way I figured it is like, look, even if she would have left, so what, right? You you get to a point where, look, everything’s more expensive, cost of groceries is up, you know, this is up, that’s up and whatever. So we all need to raise our rates a little bit to keep up with that.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (13:53)
Mm-hmm.

And for us,

my wife, Kathleen, our COO, kind of practice manager, what she keeps coming back to is our price of gloves, especially since 2020, the pandemic, is almost like tenfold increase in just the price of gloves that we’re paying. And so, you know what, we need to kind of do that. I shot myself in the foot a little bit with it because after we sent that email out to our patients doing this, two of my patients who have small businesses that we actually use,

Email me back and said, thanks for doing this. We’ve actually been on the fence about up and higher prices. So we’re going to up our prices too. It’s like, man. Yeah. I shot myself in the foot doing that, but you know, I think, I think you’re just seeing that across the board, kind of given the current economic situations.

Steven Schwartz (14:44)
Yeah. And I think, you know, it all works out in the end. Unfortunately,

you know, the value of the dollar is certainly not what it was 10 years ago or 50 years ago or a hundred years ago. It’s just how it works. But, you know, I’d say this is not the politics and economics podcast, but, there’s so many things that we could dig into with regards to that. but I’m glad to hear that, that the word of mouth is still very strong for you. That’s great. And, also.

that using Facebook and Instagram ads and posts and whatnot. Videos are very popular, obviously, short form video content. Do you use that as well?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (15:25)
We do a little bit of the short form video content. It’s actually something I want to get into a little bit more. We played with a few. We’re actually overhauling our website and overhauling a lot of our marketing stuff in the next couple of months. So we’re actually going to be doing a lot more of those type content forms for it. We’ve done some like legacy media stuff in the past, like some radio, TV, some TV guest spots on a few things. And we’ve

done some mailers and none of that has panned out quite the way that word of mouth and social media does.

Steven Schwartz (15:58)
Well, I when you look at it, people trust their friends’ opinions so much. In fact, what we talk about in our business is the power of reviews and the fact that like, I don’t know, 80 % of people trust a review on Google as much as a personal referral of their friend. And when you think, my goodness, that’s a huge percentage. It is so important that concierge and DPC practices

have a plan in place, a method of requesting reviews from their patients. And in doing so, make sure that the reviews on Google primarily, but if they’ve already left a review on Google, leave a recommendation on Facebook, leave something on health grades and whatnot. But also, there are tools and methods available that if somebody is upset about something, you have the ability to gently nudge them to provide feedback

to your practice privately so that you as the CEO can say, wow, Mr. Smith had a problem with Sally at the front desk. Let’s deal with, let’s have a talk with Sally and see if there’s something that we can improve in our business so that this doesn’t happen again, so that patients are happy and are willing to leave us five-star reviews. But just having a review system in place is so powerful and most businesses simply just don’t do it.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (17:23)
No, they don’t do it. It’s hard for physicians to that’s not something we were taught in medical school or even ingrained to say, Hey, leave me a good review for that’s just foreign to a lot of doctors to the point that, know, with a lot of my talk doing this, it’s easy to put QR codes, like posters of a QR codes that patients can scan and leave a review. We actually had a system in place for a little bit. I’m using a little while, but they would scan the QR code. And if it was four stars or more, it would actually post it. If it was less than four stars, it would just.

Brown it over to me that we could address. And that actually worked really well for a while. And granted, we, think we had one that was less than a four star on there. And it was because I don’t even remember what it was something silly to what she was upset about, but yeah, that’s a nice system to have as well.

Steven Schwartz (18:06)
Right.

And you just got to be careful. There’s something that Google calls review gating. And many people don’t know about this. So just the idea is that you can’t say, well, if you’re going to leave me a nice review, that’s good. But if you’re not going to leave us a nice review, then I’m going to make it really hard for you to leave a review. So just be sure you’re doing it as closely as possible to Google’s rules and right.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (18:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Obviously

though, it’s nice to have a couple of little one stars in there on Google. because then, know, see it’s very obviously that it’s not just inflated for it. And I loved a couple of years ago, a patient left us a one star review, say it was a patient who hadn’t been a patient for a while and was saying she couldn’t get into CS all this stuff. And then there were several comments from current patients saying, what are you talking about? Like current patients dot chiming in about, no, that’s not how it actually is. The problem was with you. It was a new problem, you know, not a practice problem.

Steven Schwartz (18:55)
Right. And then people who are

considering contacting you see the negative review. What’s with this? They read it and they realize, yeah, that person who left the review is nuts. And the regular patients stood up for you and defended. And that’s awesome. I mean, that kind of loyalty is just truly amazing. Love it. Well, let’s talk about challenges. What kind of challenges have you experienced in your practice? Some thing or two. And how did you overcome it?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (19:05)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

There’s, there’s a lot here. one actually just kind of fresh in my mind. saw a post in a DPC docs Facebook group. the, was about a year and, and a hundred, 150 odd patients and pulling her hair out with how busy she was and just saying, I can’t do this, you know, doing the math with my pricing. You know, there’s no way I’m going to get there. And I think that’s something that a lot of DPC docs go through. somewhere in that two to 300.

patient range, you know, new patients are more work, especially as you’re kind of growing and doing them. hit this too around that ballpark. like, there’s no way I’m getting, you know, 10 texts and calls a day and so many emails. And this isn’t sustainable. And when I tell people, know, take a, take a deep breath and relax and you can get through it and having kind of some systems in place, uh, you know, help having a nurse with some triage and things that they can do and kind of take that off my plate. Um, and that can help you kind of get through that. And then once those patients get

get

tucked in and established. Usually they kind of level out to the point like, I haven’t seen them in a year. You know, y’all need to come back and see me. and talking about, you know, we talked about kind of churn and things earlier. Those are the patients I worry about the ones I’d never hear from, you know, they’re the ones that might say, I don’t need your service. And we’re going to go the ones I from all the time. I’m not super worried about them leaving.

Steven Schwartz (20:31)
Right.

Exactly. Yeah.

We mentioned that earlier is that one of the programs we offer at Concierge Medical Marketing is called Nurture. And that’s specifically the service of reaching out to existing patients with an email, with a newsletter, with posts on social media, with ads that are displayed on, you know, CNN and Fox News and the History Channel website, different places so that they continue to see your name and see encouraging messages.

perhaps see nice testimonials and five-star reviews that have been said about your practice recently because we want to keep the positive vibes for your practice in their mind and obviously to encourage them to renew every year. We want them to stick around. cool. So basically, guess what I’m hearing is maybe be very careful with how many new patients you onboard every month.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (21:32)
It can. mean, at some point, know, especially when you’re just starting, you definitely want to grow and you it’s, it can be hard to turn patients away. And I still fight that too. I’m like, you know what? I want to take them all. And then like kind of at that point, we talked earlier when I was on one scene kids and I kept taking kids because I didn’t want to turn them away. And you know, in hindsight down, like, you know, maybe I should have actually went on a waiting list or kind of done something for that. But

That’s a fear I think a lot of docs have. They don’t want to turn those patients away. So I’m just going to take them, even though I may degrade my service or what I’m doing. But it’s hard when you’re just in that growth at all costs mode early in DPC, you’re going to take patients you may not really want or may not be a good fit for your practice. And it’s hard, especially if you get like a large business that wants to onboard a

big chunk of patients at once. It’s a little easier now that I’ve got multiple physicians, I can kind of spread that out across. Like for example, on the first of the year, we had two 200 employee groups join the practice on the first, but I was able to kind of spread that out a little bit across all my physicians. So not one physician took a 200 patient hit on one January.

Steven Schwartz (22:32)
Wait a minute.

I’m glad you brought up the employer groups because this is an area that I think more DPC and concierge doctors need to learn about. And the idea that you can do your marketing to get, you know, one guy, one lady, one family, one couple, or you can sign up a business with 200 all at once. How do you, how do you handle your, your billing per patient per month for your employer groups? Same rates, discounted rates. How do you do it?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (23:11)
They get a discounted rate for them. If they bring us at least five adults and sign up for the ACH draft, we want to give them the discount because it does minimize some of my administrative hurdles. So I want to make sure that’s in place, that it’s worth my time to kind of give them the discount. They get a 20 % discount for them. We give a 20 % discount for businesses that come in as long as they meet those criteria, at least five adults and sign up for the ACH. Some of my wife’s not having to like…

run down, Catholicism, have to run down, you know, your payment failed this month, you know, all those administrative things. marketing to them is, is kind of interesting because I think there’s definitely a dichotomy. You’ve got this, the small little family, family businesses, know, anywhere from, you know, one to, you know, teens, 20 employee employees. And a lot of them we get because the owner becomes a patient and just absolutely loves it. And like, Hey, how can I offer this to my employees and kind of marketing that internally at your current patient?

to say, you have a business, you own a business. Hey, know, here’s something we can provide a service and you added value add, we can add to your business. And then you got the bigger groups like those 200 employee groups that I mentioned. Those more come to me through good relationships that I’ve built with some benefits brokers or, know, some.

commercial health brokers and they’ll be like, hey, you’re fully self-insured. You really need to look at direct primary care and that’s going to really save you money at the end of the day.

Steven Schwartz (24:42)
No, I love it. And 20 % discount is pretty significant. I’m sure they’re grateful for that. Obviously, well, not obviously, for your employer groups with your five adults or more, can those employees also bring their spouses and their kids at the discounted rates?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (24:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

As long as the company pays for it, as long as all the billing goes through the company and that, you know, again, streams, lot string lines, our administrative process for it, then yeah, they could get the discount. Now on the back end, sometimes they may payroll deduct for spouses. It’s uh, it’s completely up to the company, what they wanted on the back end. Um, but the company has to pay us a hundred percent upfront or upfront, but a hundred percent for the,

patients and if they choose to, we’re, going to cover 50 % for spouses and kids or however they want to do on the backend, then that’s up to them and we’ll help them kind of set all that up on their, their HR in for it. And the other nice thing about businesses too, you kind of mentioned, you know, it’s your marketing is little more efficient bringing them in.

But also if you have individuals or individual family sign up for DPC, they’re more likely to utilize your service and come in and see you and take up time. When you get 200 employees from a business, you’re probably gonna get some healthy ones in there and your overall utilization is gonna be lower for those large employer groups than just onesies and twosies, individual families and patients that sign up.

Steven Schwartz (26:06)
I remember in my previous digital marketing agency when a man whose business was a type of construction equipment and he sold that equipment across multiple areas of the planet. normally back then we would do one website for a client. Well, he said, well, I’ve got 13 websites that I need you to build.

Holy moly, fantastic. And it was a big sale and a lot of work, but we knocked it out of the park for him. Similar to you, it’s like, look, we’ve got 200 new patients, a whole lot more cashflow, got a whole heck of a lot of onboarding we need to do, but man, this is a crazy great way to grow this business.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (26:51)
Yeah, it is. And I remember that the first large employer group at first when it was just me, I was a little hesitant and a little worried about doing that. Especially when I started thinking about how big of a chunk of my panel, this one employer could be, you if you have a two, three, an employer group and you’re a solo doc and that one employer is half your panel, what happens if they quit next week? You know, that, that worried me a lot. Uh, but as I had multiple physicians and you know what, can spread it out. You know, where

Steven Schwartz (27:10)
Exactly.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (27:17)
Overall, the total of the practice isn’t huge. You know what? That’s okay. We can handle that. And we’ve, I think over the years kind of streamlined that, the onboarding process with them and you have through, unfortunately, trial and error figured out what really works to onboard these large employer groups kind of with as minimal hassles as possible for it.

Steven Schwartz (27:37)
You mentioned earlier that you coach and assist other doctors who are considering starting a DPC practice, helping them succeed. Do you have some maybe overarching advice to somebody who’s listening to this podcast and thinks, you know, I really should do this, but can you give them some words of wisdom?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (28:02)
Honestly, take the leap. It’s hard. It’s not, I think, especially if you’ve talked to a lot of DPC docs or you look at the posts on the DPC docs Facebook group, they make it look like it’s all rose, know, rosy and great and everything that it’s hard. It’s, hard to run your own business. You know, it’s hard, you know, to do it, but it’s worth it. At the end of the day, walking away from insurance is a hundred percent worth it. Um, it’s not easy, but it is worth it. You know, make the leap, believe in yourself. You can do it and go for it.

Steven Schwartz (28:32)
Awesome. I love that encouragement. And sort of one final thought. Where do you see the DPC slash concierge as an industry going from here? And before you answer, I read a factoid several months ago that said in 2023, this was DPC concierge was $6 billion industry in the United States.

and it’s forecast to go to 13 and a half billion by 2030. So more than doubling. What are your thoughts on this as an industry where it’s going and where do you see it going?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (29:13)
Obviously I’m biased because I do it, but I think it’s going to grow and I think it’s going to grow probably exponentially with where it is. mean, just watching over the decade when I was joining, are only a handful of us in the whole country and just watching the mappers just get covered in DPC practices. I think it’s going to grow. especially as, I mean, just look at the outrage with the United healthcare, you know, with all of that and just watching the.

public reaction to it. think, you know, patients are starting to realize that their insurance is loaded with a racket and that there are better ways to kind of get their healthcare, you know, and pay for their healthcare for it. So I think overall it’s going to grow. I think you’re going to see more individual doctors doing it, which is ultimately what I want. because the trend prior to this was you saw,

physicians become employed, you saw fewer private practices. I think you’re going to see a reversal of that. You’re going to see more independent docs out there doing their thing, where both primary care and specialty care for it. But then at the same time, think you’re also still going to see larger DPC groups do it, like one medical.

probably did back in the day or, know, next era, you know, did with Clint out in Colorado. I think you’re going to see a little bit more of that because that appeals to some of these large, more nationwide employer groups. I think that’s an issue that’s going to need to be solved with these large nationwide employer groups. How do I get DPC to all my patients all over the country kind of all at once? And that’s a hard.

question to answer when you just have this network of all these individual docs from around the country. But overall, I think it’s going to grow. think specialty care is going to grow. I think that’s where you’re going to see probably the most growth.

Steven Schwartz (30:52)
Right. I would agree with that. And I think as we see this as an industry, there’s going to be more cases where independent docs offices join and have one brand and one, you know, one arrangement essentially. that, you know, similar to independent hotels joining and becoming, you know, best Western or whatever the, you know, that story was, um, or the, um, was it ACE hardware, right? All the, same.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (31:16)
Hmm.

Mm.

Steven Schwartz (31:22)
kind of story where the individual business owners join up, get the special rates and have the benefit of national marketing. So I see that happening too. And it’s just a really exciting time to be in this space. really is. As I’ve mentioned earlier, area of my business of concierge medical marketing, we are here to help the doctors grow their practice to whatever level they want.

to help them overcome the challenges that they may face so that literally they can focus on being a doctor rather than focusing on doing marketing or whatever themselves. And just quickly, the three programs that we offer, number one, transition. If a practice is a traditional insurance-based practice, maybe have two, three, 4,000 patients and really are fed up and want to become a DPC, we can help them with the marketing to help educate.

and transition those patients to the new practice. Number two, growth. So often practices need help growing. They need help with the digital marketing, the exposure, the Google rankings. Is my website good enough? Is it converting paid ads, social media posts, help me get reviews, all that kind of stuff is all related to growth. So we have program related to that. And third and final is nurture. As I mentioned before, that’s where a particular practice is full.

maybe has a waiting list and like, we’re not taking anybody else, but we still want to love on our existing patients, nurturing them so they feel really good in addition to the clinical, but feeling really good about the practice so that every month they renew, every year they renew. And it’s obviously so much easier to keep an existing patient happy than it is to find a new one and bring them aboard. So those are the three things that we offer.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (33:12)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schwartz (33:15)
One final note is I wrote a book called the definitive guide to winning with digital marketing for concierge medical practices. That book has tons of great information for the do it yourself doctor and or their team to do digital marketing to help them grow and achieve their goals. The book is available as a download from our website concierge md dot marketing. Please go there, put in your email address and click the magic button.

Our system will send you the link. You can download it and read it. And please feel free to reach out to me personally. If you have any questions, if you need us to take a look at anything with your marketing, your numbers, your goals, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I have a link, cmmkg.com slash schedule to schedule a 15 minute call with me. No, no obligation, no cost. Just happy to do it. With all that being said,

Matthew, any final thoughts or questions that you’d like to share on the podcast with existing docs, with future DPC docs, any final words of wisdom?

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (34:20)
Yeah, I think

I said it earlier. Yeah. Go for it. You know, DPC, honestly, I wouldn’t, I would do it over again every single time. It is the best, best decision I’ve ever made. You know, jump in, jump in with both feet and go for it.

Steven Schwartz (34:32)
Awesome. Matthew Hitchcock from Hitchcock Family Medicine. Thank you so much for being our guest on the podcast today. I’m so thrilled for you and your amazing growth and success in your practice and you know, keep growing man. We’re really happy for you. This has been Steve Schwartz with the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I am thrilled to have you aboard and we’ll see you on our next episode. Take care everyone. Bye bye now.

Matthew Hitchcock, MD, MBA (34:37)
Absolutely, thank you for having me.

That’s good. Thank you.