Direct Primary Care Doctor
Dr. Jamie Glover is a family physician, wife, mom, and veteran. She has been practicing medicine since 1999 when she received her M.D. in Bethesda, Maryland. She enjoys the full spectrum of family medicine including care for younger and older adults, teens, children, and infants. She enjoys men’s and women’s health, gynecology, acute care, sports medicine, behavioral health, and office procedures (from stitches to joint injections). She has special interests and experience in adolescent medicine, contraceptive procedures (including IUDs and implants), and HIV medicine.
Dr. Glover served as a physician in the U.S.A.F. for nine years, practicing outpatient, hospital, obstetric, emergency, and deployed medicine during that time. She was also on the teaching faculty at Eglin A.F.B. Family Medicine Residency and at the Uniformed Services University’s School of Medicine. After separating from the Air Force, she continued practicing medicine in varied settings as she followed her husband from state to state until his own retirement from the U.S.A.F. in 2015. Three years prior, she and her husband and their two now teenagers settled in the Monument/Colorado Springs area.
The varied settings Dr. Glover has practiced in have included providing medical care for the un- and under-insured, HIV medicine, public health work, prison medicine, rural hospital medicine, a hospice medical directorship, employment in a privately-owned practice, work in a hospital-owned practice, and work in a direct primary care (DPC) clinic called PeakMed.
"In 2017, I finally opened her own clinic in her own community so that I could be a doctor not only for families but also a doctor for the local community."
In that vein, she loves speaking at local schools, helping high schoolers with their capstone projects, and serving on the Board of Directors at the local Tri-lakes YMCA. She also enjoys being a member of the Tri-lakes Chamber of Commerce.
In 2018, she decided to seek an active appointment as an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine. Dr. Glover is so glad that CU School of Medicine now has a UCCS Branch. Approximately 24 students from each class in Denver now do the bulk of their rotations in and around Colorado Springs. Having local medical schools is very important for the future of El Paso County where Monument is located. A high percentage of physicians who train in a given area tend to remain local after graduation or tend to come back to their roots later in their careers. With the growing population, recruiting more physicians to her county is a significant need. Having medical schools also increases the overall quality of medical care in a local geographic area over time. As a CU-SOM assistant clinical professor, she now hosts medical students who rotate with me one half-day a week, 40 weeks a year. She and her patients enjoy helping medical students gain an appreciation for the beautiful specialty of family medicine. In her clinic, she introduces students to primary care as it was meant to be... relationship-based, not production-based. She hopes to show students and residents that there are alternatives to "assembly-line medicine".
RESOURCES
- Check out your local Small Business Development Center & Chamber of Commerce Activities
- Pam Wiible Courses
- AAFP co-sponsored DPC Summit (LOOK HERE FOR REGISTRATION)
- Hint Summit
- Nuts & Bolts
- DPC Docs & DPC Women FB Groups
- Dave Ramsey
- State AFP chapter
CONTACT:
P: 719-344-2789
F: 719-362-1102
SOCIALS:
FB: gloverfm
Dr. Glover's Helping Hands Jar
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Transcript*
Hey guys, this is Maryelle saying a huge thank you to the listeners and especially to the guests who have shared their stories on the podcast. In 2022, my DP C story released its 100th episode, surpassed 87,000, listens just an Apple podcasts alone, and made the top 90 on the Apple Podcast medicine chart in the.
The words of the physicians on this podcast are being heard and continue to inspire physicians all over the country to learn and thrive under the DP C model. Now, here's season three of my DP C story.
Direct Primary care is an innovative alternative path to insurance driven healthcare. Typically, a patient pays their doctor a low monthly membership and in return builds a lasting relationship with their doctor and has their doctor available at their fingertips. Welcome to the My DP C story podcast, where.
You will hear the ever so relatable stories shared by physicians who have chosen to practice medicine in their individual communities through the direct primary care model. I'm your host, Marielle conception family physician, D P C, owner, and former fee for Service. Doctor, I hope you enjoy today's episode and come away feeling inspired about the future of patient care direct Primary care.
Why did I do DPC? I did DPC because there are so many people who are underserved in primary care in our country. Literally every person who has a primary care doctor in our country is not well served. So I wanted to fix that. I wanted to create a clinic where both the patients are well served, they get, the service that they expect and want and deserve and a clinic where I can also enjoy the profession that I chose and get back to the real root reasons of why I chose the profession of being a physician and specifically of family practice. That is a relationship-driven thing and it's a relationship with my patients and I just wanted to create a practice where I could make that relationship the priority in the clinic. Since I started DPC, I really developed a heart for the self-employed people of the United States. The laborers, the people who are caught in the Medicaid gap, who make just a little bit too much for Medicaid, people who are contractors, people who work for small nonprofits, all the people who are not given on a silver platter some awesome insurance. And so those are my people now that make up half of my practice and I love serving that population of
our country.
I'm Dr. Jamie Glover of Glover Family Medicine, and this is my DPC story.
Dr. Jamie Glover is a family medicine physician, wife, mom, and veteran. She has been practicing medicine since 1999 when she received her MD and Bethesda Maryland. She enjoys the full spectrum of family medicine, including care for younger and older adults, teens, children, and infants. She enjoys men's and women's health, gynecology, acute care, sports medicine, behavioral health and office procedures, ranging from stitches to joint injections.
She has special interests and experience in adolescent medicine, contraceptive procedures, including IUDs and implants and hiv. Dr. Glover served as a physician in the United States Air Force for nine years practicing outpatient hospital obstetric emergency, and deployed medicine. During that time, she was also on the teaching faculty at England Air Force Base Family Medicine Residency, and at the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine.
After separating from the Air Force, she continued practicing medicine in varied settings as she followed her husband from state to state until his own retirement from the Air Force in 2015. Three years prior, she and her husband and their two now teenagers settled in the monument Colorado Springs area.
The varied settings Dr. Glover has practiced in, have included providing medical care for the UN and underinsured, H I V medicine, public health work, prison medicine, rural hospital medicine, a. Medical directorship, employment in a privately owned practice, work in a hospital owned practice, and work in a direct primary care practice called Peak Med.
In 2017, she finally opened her own clinic in her own community so that she could be a doctor, not only for families. But also a doctor for the local community. In 2018, she decided to seek an active appointment as an assistant clinical professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr.
Glover is so glad that CU School of Medicine now has a U C C S branch, where approximately 24 students from each class in Denver now do the bulk of their rotations in and around. Colorado Springs as a CU School of Medicine Assistant clinical professor, she now hosts medical students who rotate with her one half day a week, 40 weeks a year.
She and her patients enjoy helping medical students gain an appreciation for the beautiful specialty of family medicine in her clinic. She introduces students to primary care as it was meant to. Relationship based, not production based. She hopes to show students and residents that there are alternatives to assembly line medicine.
Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Glover. Thank you. So glad to be. So
you are another person. I had the awesome privilege of meeting last year at Hint Summit and so it is so wonderful to talk with you and to get your story on the airwaves for the whole audience to hear.
So I wanted to start with a quote that you have on your website and that quote is, I tried to introduce students to primary care as it was meant to be relationship-based, not production-based. I hope to show students and residents that there are alternatives to assembly line medicine. And so just in alignment with that statement and your opening statement, I wanna step back into your beginnings into primary care and why you chose family medicine as your
specialty.
I chose family medicine on my rotations as a young Air Force officer rotating at Eggland Air Force Base, and it just clicked with me. I'm a people person, I'm a relationship person. I. I love the added complexity of what patients bring to their physical problems. Like that whole overlay of whatever it might be, anxiety or stress, it actually makes patients interesting to me.
Cuz if I saw just head colds all day without something added into that it wouldn't be that fun for me. So I do love human interaction. I love the challenge of just dealing with the broad spectrum of the population. So family medicine just fit with me, but it takes time to develop relationships and to deal with those other layers that come into the doctor patient relationship that come into the exam room, that come into the clinical encounter.
And I chose family medicine. I'm so happy that I did. But at the same time in the Air Force, great environment, wonderful residency, but what would happen is, You might have a panel of patients and then maybe your buddy would get deployed, so you would have their panel too. So you would have a double panel.
And it was very difficult to take care of those people in the way I wanted to. And I was faculty in a family medicine residence program and I taught residents as well as had rotating medical students from the Uniform Services University as well as other Air Force medical students from other medical schools around the country.
And so it got to be hard to teach them family medicine and say this is what it should be, but it really isn't. And I felt guilty recruiting people into my beautiful specialty and maybe even feel like I was lying to them about the way it was out there, that it was the way it was supposed to be, but it really wasn't.
Then I got out into the civilian. I had a very varied practice. I got to see so many different things. I got to see prison medicine, low income medicine, h i v medicine. I got to work in a private practice that got acquired by a big health system. I did rural temp work. I did so many different things that I got a really great perspective on the whole medical system and how we should treat our patients and how we should train the next generation of physicians.
And so I said the only way I can do this, I heard about DBC from Clint Landino Nter giving a speech once at the Colorado Academy Family Physicians. And I said I have to do this. And I scared myself when I said that cuz I knew I wasn't lying to myself. I was like, I'm gonna do this. And we, and I did do that.
I knew I wanted to help train the next generation just as I had been faculty in the Air Force. And so I went to. Cu, university of Colorado School of Medicine and I volunteered to teach medical students in my practice, third year students, now also second year students. And I wanted to train them in an environment that shows them that family medicine is like a legitimate choice, a beautiful specialty, and something that they can do.
And I feel like I've been really successful in that because my first med student that ever rotated with me in that program, he wanted to do either neurology or neurosurgery, probably neurosurgery. But when he left my rotation, now he did go neurosurgery and I'm so proud of him. But he was like, you almost made an internal medicine doc out me.
I almost made a primary care doc out him. And I'm not going for wins in that, but I just wanna show that generation that you can do things the right way. There is a way to do it right, to have a relationship. Non-production driven practice. And and then practice can be fun and beautiful. You can actually doctor people the way doctoring is meant to be.
So cool. And your journey in particular has, so many different aspects to it compared to most people who go to undergrad and then go to medical school and then go to residency. Because you've been in the Air Force, because you've been in the clinics and the settings that you mentioned when you look back on your experience and you talk to medical students nowadays, do you have any recommendations for those people who are, dipping their toes into relationship-based primary care in different settings, in terms of rotations that they should look into or scholarships or any opportunities that would give a really good primer to relationship-based primary care in including d p
C clinics?
I. I think at the level I teach, which is medical students now, I would love to teach in a residency, but we do not have an MD residency in the town of Colorado Springs right now. There is a deal residency. I don't have a relationship with them yet, and I would love to have a relationship with them.
I'm an md but I think we can all train each other, we can all learn so much from each other. But I do think when, and I can teach residents, I strongly would recommend residents consider a practice management rotation, one or two of them in their residency. And that one of them be with some sort of alternative practice model like D P C, which hopefully won't remain alternative for long, which will become mainstream over the years.
But anyway, so I definitely think they should do that. I can't say that I have any knowledge of scholarships and stuff like that. Do you have anything like that? .
So just given that the listeners are tuning in from all over the country and in all over the world, what I would say is, Take the idea of, I would like to find a scholarship and start googling asking local d p c doctors because there's so many random scholarships.
Like for example, the Sar Optimus Club in our town locally is giving female. College students like $500 towards education as long as they're enrolled in college. And so it's like little things like that. $500 here or there, it adds up. That's how I got through a third of my uc Davis tuition fees.
And so I definitely would say I, I'm in the same boat. I don't have any particular scholarships, but I would say that's where I would start in terms of investigating, is there a scholarship? And if you're not yet at the level of getting, a particular scholarship, like if you're a medical student and you're looking at a residency scholarship later on and you see the criteria that one needs to later apply for that scholarship those are certain things that you could work towards now.
You know, Like if somebody did wanna go into primary care, there's lots. Pro primary care opportunities.
You jogged my memory. So our Colorado Academy of Family Physicians is very pro D P C and in fact, when we put our legislation to our state Congress back in 2017 to protect D P C as the primary care model that it is and not insurance they helped us organize that and our organized.
Just made it a beautiful process. Everyone at our state capital recognized it as a nonpartisan issue that DP C is a safety net for many people. And it was the Colorado Academy of Family Physicians who helped us organize that effort I'll as DPC docs. And so they give a scholarship to the Colorado Academy of Family Physicians Conference every year.
And there are always DP C docs at that too. And sometimes D P C lectures. That's where I first heard about DP C from Clint Flanagan. And I think it was 2015 or 14 even when I said I'm gonna do this. So there's that scholarship, to go to a conference. And then there's also, of course, hint, my billing company is Hint and.
We all choose our various softwares and things like that, and there's pluses and minuses to all of them. But I just love Hint the company so much and they're much more than just billing software. They're practice management and so much more visionary. I would never leave them, but they offer scholarships to their hint conference, which isn't so much gonna get you like continuing medical education, but it's gonna get you excited about the possibilities and thinking outside the box and what could be done and d PBC and beyond.
So there's that hint scholarship too that I think people should know about or next era I think paid for some students to go to. The Hint thing too, I don't know if they exactly called it a scholarship, but the point is there's people who are willing to help students get experiences that will help them, shape their future.
I love that. And for any listener who is interested in finding out more about the conferences, if you go to the my DPC story.com resources page, there's links to the main conferences, the Hint Summit, the A f P co-sponsored DPC Summit as well as the Nuts and Bolts conference. And I, and you can look for updated information about the con, the upcoming conferences, as well as if there are scholarship opportunities because like you mentioned, the A F P co-sponsored summit that is co-sponsored with the D B C Alliance as well as the American College of Osteopathic Family Medicine, as well as the family Medicine Education Consortium. They typically offer a significantly discounted rate for medical students and residents. And if you are working with a local D P C, whether that be a micro practitioner or a larger company, you can ask if even that d p C offers scholarships in particular, cuz I've seen that on the Facebook groups before, that individual D p C doctors will bring a medical student or resident with them.
The Hint conference was in Denver this year. And so I had a medical student, and he worked with me on Fridays and I was gonna be at the Hint conference on Friday and I said, Hey, do you wanna talk to your preceptor?
And I could bring you along, one or two days you can come both days, you can get outta something else or just one day or, whatever. Yeah, it's true. Like I think D P C doctors we're excited about what we do and we wanna share it That's so
true. And now going back to you mentioning in 2015, you heard Dr.
Clint Flanagan talk about D P C when you heard him talk about D P C and then fast forwarding to your journey into D P C. What did the next steps look like? Because before opening Glover Family Medicine, you were a physician at PeakMed.
It turns out, I think it was 2014 that he spoke and I was literally so excited cuz I was like, this will allow me to. Primary care the right way, and this will be good for me and this will be good for my patients.
It'll be good for teaching. So I literally went home from that conference. It ended on a Sunday, you know, at noon. And I googled D P C in my town. I came across some stuff and I kind researched that and somewhere along the way I stumbled across Mark Thomas Solo and PeakMed who were, gonna be opening.
So this is 2014, sometime within maybe the next year. Ha. I don't think he had actually opened yet. So I literally just called him. I was so excited. I stalk his info somehow and I called him But simultaneously, very soon after that I also was researching what are D P C conferences I might be able to go to, do these things exist, and I found one that I signed up for the summer of 2015. But meanwhile, mark did get back to me. I met him at a local coffee shop and he told me his vision. It was small at first, which, great, small or big, whatever you wanna do. And we made a tentative plan that I might be his first doctor.
He had started the DPC two working it himself, but he did get the eye of some investors and things and they started thinking more about employer groups, which is great cuz we need to rescue the employers of our country from this terrible situation. The tape worm that, I think, you know, is.
Eating up all of their revenue basically, and that's providing healthcare for their employees. So we do need to rescue them too, as DP C. But Mark was starting to go more in toward that space before he had even actually started working in his DP C And so he was looking for another doctor to actually start in the DP C.
Now I had some various things happen in my life. The clinic where I was working, the doctor got cancer. I was the only doc left in the clinic while he was getting treatment. He did survive, it was harsh treatment and there was a bunch of PAs in that clinic too. And I really felt a responsibility to stay there for an extra year to help that clinic survive.
So in the end, I did not become Mark's first doctor Eric Hetzel did. He's a great guy. He's my friend. We worked together at Peaked. I did become the second doctor at PeakMed. So I was in on the early days. But meanwhile, I was also going to these conferences. I went to a Pamela Weibel Live Your Dream Conference.
Two that was a little bit more outside of the realm of D P C, but direct care. Proponent in a different kind of way. Maybe not in a monthly membership kind of way, but in the whole let's get back to relationship-based medicine kind of way. And um, so meanwhile I start volunteering at Peak Med one day a week.
Just gave it to him for free. Quit the clinic where I was working. Once it my doctor got better, it transferred hands to the big health system. They let me be a contractor for a year. I would not sign the employment agreement. I read about our reviews. I was like, Nope, I'm not signing that. Did a bunch of temp work, started volunteering at PeakMed and then started working at PeakMed.
I think it was January of 2016. And they, because they went for employer groups, were able to give me a big panel right away. Pretty big, like at least maybe 350 patients from like a credit, a local credit union had signed up their people to be taken care of by PeakMed. So I pretty much within maybe.
Two months I was already up above maybe 550 patients and within a few more months after that, I think I had a panel of it was 700 to seven 50 patients. That's a unique situation and great. But I should have known that I always had it in me to do my own thing because if you're like the kind of person who's looking for conferences and signing up for them and going to them yourselves and those kinds of things, it probably just means you wanna be your own boss.
And I realized that pretty soon in I'm like, I just wanna do it my way. I want it to be my dream and my goals and I'm not against the employer group thing at all and I am in this town with Peak Med and we are friends and I support them. I closed my panel at one point for 11 months cuz I was too busy and we referred people down the street to Peak Med, but if you are that person that's like really.
Active on DPC docs, Facebook page, dpc, women going to your own conferences. You probably just wanna be your own boss, . So just do it from the beginning. And that was my journey. And I, I did have to opt real quick back into Medicare and cause I had opted out. But in order to do my own dp c I needed to do some, a little temp work in the in between and while I started.
So I opted in on, at that time, day 88, I don't know if it's the same anymore. And then I was able to go do some temp work and open my own D P C. I moved, more than 15 miles away from PeakMed. I was not doing that to be a competitor. I was doing that because that was my destiny. .
For those people who are on the fence and looking at potentially bridging their hesitancy with an employed position, what are some other words that you could share with them in terms of negotiations or in terms of how to advocate for yourself if that's possible in a contract to control the rate of growth on a panel.
For example
okay. So first off when I was coming together to talk about that contract, there was a 30 mile non-compete, clause in there. I was traveling into Colorado Springs down in some altitude and, like maybe 25, 30 minutes away from my home to work at this particular clinic that I was signing on to. If things didn't work out. I wanted to be able to have a clinic in my very own town, which is Monument Colorado, the Tri Lakes area.
It's close to Carter Springs, but it's a distinct entity because we are on a divide and we have like mountain foothills type of climate. So people don't like to go from here down into the springs, and they don't like to go from the springs up to monument, it has its own little feel and I'm like, that's actually where I'm, where I live.
And so I was like, I don't I'm not gonna do this job. I wouldn't have even signed it. If that compete is gonna stay 30 miles, it needs to be 50 miles or less. Because if this isn't the right thing for me to potentially do for the rest of my life, then I need to be able to go where I'm from and, do my own thing, whatever that looks like.
That was just like how I really felt about. And so when we were signing the contract, I think people can tell when you're literally not gonna sign the contract over that thing, and I wouldn't have. And so that was, how I negotiated because it was like a true sticking point for me.
But it wasn't, there was no animosity or anything. He agreed to it, so he just asked . So there was that. Then as far as panel growth, it's complicated because I was really scared at the beginning to get so many patients at once, to get like 350 and then 500, 5 50 just within a couple months.
But it's really different when you get a dump of employer room patients on you. Then when you have individual patients and families signing up for you, usually at that moment for a very specific reason, because they need you. And so they definitely come in for their new patient visits. Whereas when you get in a, say I had 350 employees roughly from one.
Employer put into my panel. Half of them weren't even in the room getting the briefing from the HR person cuz they're the spouse of someone who works here. They don't even know what benefit they have. The other half that were in the room getting the briefing, they don't even really care.
They're young. They don't care whenever their benefits aren't until they need them, and Actually when you get an dump of employer basis all at once, you don't necessarily get overwhelmed with new patient visits. And in fact, I learned I had to call both parties, like both adults in the household, if there were two adults to explain hey, through your spouse's employer , you have this benefit.
And we would make sure to not only call the employee but the spouse because, and if you wanna take advantage of it, , this is what it is and this is how you contact us and we'd love to see you for a new patient visit and all of that. If I could talk to in person, great, but a lot of times you get voicemails.
So I had to create a script. And then when I was comparing my panel at the time to the other doctor who was there, there was a point where my panel actually got bigger. But is it just based on numbers? Like how busy is your panel? Because that doctor at a panel who had grown initially more by individuals and families, And then their first smaller employer employees, which Peaked was very aggressive about going out and seeking and did a great job getting lot to little small employers and then medium one and then what I call big, like maybe a company with seven 50 at the time.
I don't know what they're going for now, but that's a big to me . That panel like looked different than mine, which started with a big employer group, and so it's hard to say whose panel is busier? Is it the one with the more numbers or is it the one where that has more individuals and families who sign themselves up and are more engaged?
So it's pretty complicated. I learned, and it gave me a little bit, not of fear, but it would be complicated bringing someone into DP C and being their employer and explaining that to them because probably it's hard to compare panels. That's all I can say. I think those are extremely helpful
points to make.
And I think that, it really highlights that at the end of the day, just like how you talked about seeking a practice management rotation for those people who have the ability to find and rotate in one, this is the type of practice management question that people should be asking because it's it's like how you hear some people saying, oh, I have 50 people, but each of those 50 has, seven hours.
Every three months that I care for them, versus a person who takes care of a patient for four hours over the entire year. So busy does not equal a certain number. And I think that is a really, really good point to make because I think there is a little bit of, oh, this person is how many patients?
And yes, it might equate to, more patients equals more money. But then that also equates to looking at how much time you spend per patient and potentially raising your prices if you're already open. And, having a panel where you're giving so much time to each patient.
I love that and I love that, you spoke up for yourself when it came to. I live in Monument, I can't sign a contract that will prevent me from practicing in my area if that if that desire ever arose. And so I think that is another great point to mention because, if somebody is seeking employment in a direct primary care clinic, you, you have to read the contract.
That's looking out for your basic autonomy. And it has nothing to do with, like you said, animosity or anything. It's just basic. If you're gonna be employed, know what your contract says and are you okay with it? So I think that those are super sage pieces of advice.
I don't think I personally would write a non-compete for another doctor. It's just how I am. When I first moved to Colorado Springs, I worked for a doctor in private practice and he didn't put a non-compete on me. So he had a two page contract and I would have something but. It would be much shorter than what I signed or what I signed for, anyone, uc Health or anyone else.
And there would be no noncompete. I am confident in my ability, to maintain the panel and practice that is right for me. And if someone literally wanted to open up down the road I don't think they would end up stealing patients from me. Maybe it's something where I invested overhead in them and they, you know, in the end maybe lose like financially.
But I probably, as long as we're on good terms, would try to somehow partner with them. You know, like, Hey, let's share back each other up and let's try have a, handshake agreement that we're not gonna overly try to steal each other patients or undercut each other.
And I think that that it really is hard to argue that a place is too saturated with
D P C. It's true. And even PeakMed actually ended up, after I opened here they ended opening one not far down the interstate from me.
Still technically Carter Springs. I'm technically a monument, but if you take the interstate and go down and out to do just a little bit, it might only be 11 minutes away. And I wasn't scared. I wasn't like, oh my gosh, like they're opening up right there. What's gonna happen to me? I wasn't, and what happened?
Nothing. And then when I closed, I had a place to, briefly do my panel, send patients to, and then, whenever he opened I don't know, it just, it was just fine. It was just fine. He can't be too saturated, love it. So
now going to, going into opening Glover Family Medicine, given that you had been to given that you had been at A D P C even though you were an employee, Going from that position to opening your own direct primary care practice, how was opening in terms of strategically planning in terms of your onboarding workflow?
How was it for you because you had the experience you did going into
I think I already had some ideas about what I wanted. I knew that someday I wanted to grow to have a support staff of at least 2.5 FTE supporting me, roughly, just because of what I've seen and the kind of practice I want and the kind of coverage I wanna be able to have when I'm on vacation or on off days.
And some people start with the micropractice or, whatever. But I knew I wanted to get to that. I knew I couldn't start with that. I pretty much had to start as a micropractice. But because I had seen what I'd seen and gone to conferences and also been really freed by Pamela libel to just start without much preparation, I I went to an attorney, a banker, and an accountant in one day and then I made plans.
That was like August to, I started to rent part of a place, an optometry clinic that had extra space. I just started knocking up clinics, physical therapy, whatever. I was gonna open in November, so like August and November and just have a low overhead to start and just do it, I didn't do pre enrollments or anything though cuz I didn't wanna give the perception of hurting PeakMed or anything like that cuz I really wasn't trying to hurt them. It just wasn't the right thing for me. I didn't wanna do that cuz then I thought it might plus some of their patients and I want them to be successful on their own and me on my own, in my own community.
The thing fell through this rental that I did for November. So I did start at the very end of December out of home office coffee shop, and. Those kind of visits. Also, I worked outta hospice at the time and they had like little extra rooms so I could do consultations in there too. So I did that from late December through January, February.
Had to find a new space and renovate that just a little bit from January, February, March open in March. So I just, like I say, just start, just be like, okay, I'm just gonna start this thing. All I really needed for my home and all those office and the coffee shop and consultation and visits was, and I did have my E M R, so I had Hint to sign people up and I had elation.
I don't know if I had Shruti or not. I think I did. I, yeah, I did. I had Hint, latian, sp I had my software set up. And an entity which is really easy to do in Colorado. Just like literally signed up for I think $20 on the Secretary of State website or something. And an accountant. And I do a bookkeeper.
I can't remember, I don't think I had her yet, but I got hurt pretty quick after that. Anyway, so just start . And then a few patients from a previous practice came over to me. So I had previously been at North Springs Family Medicine Urgent Care in 2000, say 13 to 15. And then dabbled around PeakMed, another temp work in 1516 and then opened in, basically January of 2017.
And some people just, they just find you and so at least I had a few patients, by the time I actually opened my physical office, maybe I had 35 or 40 patients for that. And it of gave me that practice with the software and I really didn't have any, Overhead to speak of just the payment for the software.
And I had put just a little money in at the beginning, no loans. And I survived off that for that whole time as well as for the first three months after opening. And then all the bills were being paid by the memberships by that point. I never had to take any loans, which is great. But I did put a little one here at the beginning, I didn't take a loan for it, but it was savings, now
going into your sixth year, which is amazing. Oh. When you look back on that time going into opening your own practice, are there any things that you would have done differently? You mentioned the things that you did along the way, but were there any, parts of your workflow or patient experience or your experience in terms of, your daily schedule that you would have done differently?
I picked software just based on what I thought, but I did open, my husband was in a career transition phase of his life and he was my helper. And I would say he worked at least halftime, like at least 20 hours a week helping me out and not medical, never been medical admin.
And he. Could only handle so much medical software, and other new software. And so I had all these visions about how I would use Spruce and everything else, and that didn't happen because the way I would use it is not what he was capable or wanted to do. If you have someone like that in your life who's gonna help you, you probably should have input into the workflow.
They should have input into the workflows. And I have still never deviated from the way things started. I would love to use Spruce in a more expanded way, but once he was there and then he trained the next person and they trained the next person we just still use the things the same way we did when we started, because that's just how it happened.
And then you get too busy to change. So I would just have the, anyone that you're gonna work with be a part of that and realize how much you actually probably do know about making software function together just as a physician having been on EMRs and stuff for years. I wish that, I might have been able to simplify my cost of software if I had talked to Matt and had a few less pieces of software at the beginning.
I am really glad I did have a helper though, personally because it really helped with marketing because a lot of, when you're new, it's people calling to find out what you're all about and while they're doing that, and those can be long phone calls at first. And if I didn't have. I don't know what I would've done, I'll be honest, because then I'm trying to, like, how do I order supplies?
I gotta create processes like if I have, I'm dipping a urine or whatever, like where am I gonna write that down until I get it in the emr, whatever else. Creating myself little memory genre, flow sheets. I'm really glad I had him. I guess that doesn't answer your question and you're asking what would I have done differently?
My whole first year, I'm really happy with, I'll be honest, because it was simple and small.
I love it. And, I think that. You really do answer the question in that, you're looking back on what was really crucial to making your practice successful.
Now, almost six years later. So one of the things I wanna highlight bear is that and you had, you'd posted your hint growth your attrition and your growth graph which is something that you can have as a hint user something to track your your clinic growth.
But you had a hundred members by about nine months in, and then just a little over three years in, you had grown to 120% of your opening number. And so looking back, what comments do you have for the audience in terms of growth and how to control growth?
Because you mentioned also that for 11 months you were on a hiatus from accepting people because you decided that was right for you.
Yeah, I think whatever is right for you is not wrong.
So you can, I really don't think you can listen to other people about this cuz you're gonna have different services than everyone else. And then how you administer those services are gonna be different from everyone else. And so for me at first, I. Unlimited patients, whoever called, that's who I took. And then, maybe a year into that, I'm like, I can't do this anymore.
I, I max four, four new ones a week. And then there's a point where I'm like I, I can't see this many new people a week and still keep up with my other patients. So that's it. I'm going to two new ones a week, and then finally I was like, I'm too busy. Things happen. Covid happens. You're starting to try to figure out how to get shots, monoclonal, antibody, whatever.
You're just busy. And so I was like, that's it. I. I'm not taking any new patients for a while and I was nervous. I was like, what if everyone forgets about me and doesn't know what I am anymore? Strangely, it worked the opposite way because I guess supply demand, so the supply of my appointments and new patient visits got very small, like almost zero.
You know, I am in charge of my own clinic so I could, you have your friends and this and that, you can let a few people in, but for the most part I said no to everyone. And we referred to the other DPCs in town too, so we were like, Hey, here's some other places you could go. Some of those patients were sad just because A, they'd either heard about me, not cuz they were against the other clinics because I'm up here and they're from up here and this I'm who they heard about and B, just cuz the location.
Cuz they're like, you're right down the street from me. And I'm like, I'm sorry you just, right now we're just not doing this. You know? So anyway so that worked in my favor to close in a way because when I opened there was plenty of demand even though we didn't even keep a waiting list actually.
We sent people out here. Cause I just didn't know how long I was gonna be close, but I'll be honest. And we just didn't want people stagnating on the waiting list. I didn't necessarily have another doctor coming to work for me tomorrow. So we're like, it's a pandemic, go get yourself a doctor.
There's some great ones in town. So when I did reopen, I decided to reopen with just one minute unit a week. And that has been great actually. So that was, I don't remember if it was it March that I reopened of this year to taking new patients again. And one new unit means it's either an individual, a couple, or a family.
So we just sign up one new unit a week and we try to get them all in for new patient visits. That can happen anytime, but just the signups, like they pre-enroll, but we have to activate the enrollment. We call them when they pre-enroll and say, Hey, thanks for pre enrolling on the website, but we actually have a waiting list.
Or if they call us we say, Hey we do have a waiting list. The funny thing is most people would rather wait on the waiting list than go into college or springs to the other DPCs cuz either they're from here up here or they. They just know me cuz word of mouth. Cuz eventually word of mouth is a really big deal.
That's, I say control the growth for you. I. I find that four 50 to 500 is a good number for me. And only seeing this one new unit a week is a good amount of new people to see. Once I was full at the beginning, I could obviously handle a lot more new patients, but it just continually changed as my pain will change.
And I am, I provide service the way I provide it. I really like to know my patients. I spend a lot of time at the new patient visit. I'll have a second and third one if needed. If I really feel like I know them, they really feel like they know me, they trust me. They actually take my advice, I touch them.
I do non like U S P S T F indicated physical exams because I feel like touching the patient is part of the culture of the exam. I do breast exams on women. I even do breast exams on 80 year old women because I'm like yeah, I'm not gonna do mammogram at that age, but what if they have a fun dating mass that nobody's looked at?
Cuz nobody ever looks at their body, That's just the way I practice medicine. I call people in for their physical exams every year. That may or may not be indicated either for some ages you might be like, oh, every other year is fine. I do that. Some people might not do that. I don't know what people do.
So what I do is right for me and my patients and it's working. So I'm like, do what's right for you and your patients. Cultivate that panel that who it works for, and don't look at anything anyone else is doing. And then you have to have budget. So charge whatever rates, make your budget work.
So that's the part where I'm a little bit like, is there really much of a distinction sometimes between DPC and concierge? What if you need to charge like $115 for your older population to make your budget work, or eight to five? Are you a bad person? Cause one's charging more or not? No, you're not.
So do look at your budget practice medicine the right way for you and your patients and you, you won't be wrong.
I love that and I hope that it gives some listeners confidence in terms of not only pricing, but also again, busy does not equal a certain number, so it doesn't, yeah. So I love that. Now, you are an assistant professor at Colorado, at CU School of Medicine.
And so when you talked earlier about how you volunteer your time for the medical students there, and you also have students rotating with you , how has that been creating a curriculum or creating experiences for medical students when they go from the classroom learning to learning in your clinic, learning with boots on the
ground?
I think D B C is just the greatest place to Teach students how to really doctor, when, if you understand what doctoring is, it's like really caring for people and, you know, having their trust and I mean, just caring about more than just like their diagnoses and all of that. Or getting through clinic.
And so I my goal is for a med student to see only two or three patients in a half day. These are mostly third year students and now even some second years. But they actually can deal with so many more things in one visit than they could elsewhere. So say somewhere else you're seeing more volume, but then just.
Dealing with one little thing and maybe not very well, just cuz time constraints knocks anyone's fault. Versus my clinic where it's like different things come up and I'm like, Hey, we got the time to spend with this patient, so go ahead and do it and learn, I know he came in for this, but we're allowed to do an, oh by the way, at the wellness visit here, and so take some time going into the vertigo or whatever else that, do a haul pike, the curriculum is really just presents itself honestly. And then as we go throughout, I mean I obviously really, I think the biggest part of the curriculum is teaching them about what kind of insurance people do and don't have. Because some of the clinics, they're rotating in. They don't know cuz it's a selected population of insured patients.
So they don't actually know that these people exist , that don't ha, that have health shares or they're just self-employed and they have nothing. Or their deductibles 8,000 cuz those people don't go into the other clinics. I tell the students, and I love their school cu but I even had a patient a missionary from Afghanistan, was home for a year on a sabbatical.
An American citizen who doesn't have insurance, because she's a missionary and she's on sabbatical and she had a very interesting neurological diagnosis that's unusual. And she wanted to see an expert in that before she went back to Afghanistan. And I understood that, and the expert in our state was at CU Anschutz, like our medical school.
I thought it was like a resource of our state. They didn't take self pay patients and she was willing to pay whatever cuz she needed that reassurance before going back to a country with limited resources. And so I was like, The medical school clinic, but neurology clinic doesn't take self-pay patients.
Do you know how many self-pay patients there are in our country? So that is like the curriculum I teach the students, like these people exist and this is why. And now there's a whole nother group that I used to take care of when I worked in a big expanded health department. Those are the patients who have, you know, Medicaid basically.
And right now I'll admit, and especially in Colorado, that's not my main population. My main population starts at the Medicaid gap. They start with the people who just make a little too much for Medicaid and who's taking care of them. So sometimes people get don't you feel bad not taking care of the people with Medicaid?
I'm like they have a plan. The people I take care of don't. So I'm glad, like they have the F Q H C down the road. And I used to work in a place just like that, and I did take care of those people and they were my primary population at one point in my career. And now my population is this population that I didn't even really know existed.
All these people with no insurance, or poor insurance or insurance, variance, like health shares that are, not really insurance. So that's my main curriculum is teaching these med students about like that. And then also I, part of my curriculum is just teaching them about the culture of touch and why I still do like extensive physical exams.
Even if the U S P S T F says some things aren't indicated by levels of evidence. And then, just teaching them like, this is how, I don't know what you're gonna do someday, but this is how you can give people good rates on labs. This is how there's this thing called client billing and what is that?
And they're amazed. And here's like a wholesale pharmacy right behind me. And I just refilled, my med student was with me this morning and one of my patients that's a music teacher who has no insurance she needed refills of four things. I usually give about six months supply at a time if I can.
And I refilled. Eight different medications for $66, and I was like, do you know what this would've cost her? And the meds didn't have no idea, you know, like this is how much it saved her. And any doctor, at least in our state could do this, you know? but they don't really have time to, so you have to have a different kind of practice that allows you the time to do that.
That allows you, it's a pain dealing with client billing sometimes for labs, I'll be honest, because I do have the patients with good insurance and my staff has to understand two processes, like how we bill, like how to do the patients with insurance and then the client bill ones. And it's a little bit fussy sometimes actually.
But in this kind of practice we have time to do that. Other practices, they could actually do that, like the big box practice down the road could do client billing, but they don't have time for that . That's part of my curriculum is really, it really is practice management cuz I'm just trying to, in the way of try to give them ideas for the future.
Think outside the box. Wherever you go and whatever you do in your medical career. And one of
the amazing aspects of your clinic is that you have a Helping Hands program. So you know when your practice is actively refuting this idea that you are concierge medicine only for the rich people.
Can you tell us more about your Helping Hands program? How did it get created and how is it being
used? So it started at the very beginning of the pandemic. We had in March of 2020, a bridge club here in Colorado Springs who got covid very early and had at least four deaths right off.
And I knew a couple of those patients. I saw who they gave it to. So Colorado shut down real fast and Colorado Springs did and I had. Immediately a realtor who came to me, like within that first month, who was having issues, a massage therapist, with paying their bills.
And I wanted to help them, but I also was like, I gotta keep paying my staff. I don't know where Covid is gonna go. Is this gonna hurt me? And my bottom line too, so that I can't even pay my staff. Cuz by this point I did have a support staff. And so I just, we all, just the employees, I was like, does anyone wanna, do this and what should we call it?
And, you know, we kinda all talked together and then we all threw in just a little bit of money and so that we could give it to that first massage therapist, that first realtor who were having trouble with our memberships. And then I just, I told my family, my like extended family, my mom and, whatever, my grandma and they all donated into it.
So it started with just employees and my family members and maybe some of theirs. And then we put it out in a newsletter. And I don't do regular newsletters, I just do newsletters when I feel like I have something to say and it's. Literally, as soon as I have something to say, I can fill up two or three pages of stuff.
It's so funny. But if I sit there and like pressure myself, like you gotta do a newsletter every so often and have little sections I don't do well with that. So pretty much if it's oh, it's time for flu shots, I'll like put that out there and, and then all of a sudden I, I can think of paragraphs and paragraphs and what of stuff to say.
So in a couple of newsletters I threw in, Hey, we have this Helping Hands fund. And we have a little jar up front and we have cute little hands on it and whatever. And people put money into there. And my patients who are young, like twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, they are not rich.
But some of my patients who are 65 and up. Well Enough off that they put like fifties and a hundred s in that thing so that fund stays at like 2,500 to $3,000. And we use it at first just for services that we provided in clinic. If someone would say something like, oh, I'm gonna put off these labs because my husband just lost his job, then we're like, don't worry about it.
We'll pay for it with helping hands fund. And then every now and then we actually do pay for outside services. Like I had a person with diabetes who had neuropathy, who rolled their vehicle onto their leg, their own bike motorbike. And it was not a reliable exam.
Because I was like, I don't think this is fractured, but how can you really tell if someone can't feel, you know? I was like, we really need a foot in an ankle series. But he had just lost his job and so I said, you know what, I have $120 cash right now. We can get a foot series for 60 bucks and an ankle series for 60 bucks, and I know where to get it for that.
And we um, here, just take this hundred $20 and just go to the x-ray place and get it done, because he just really needed it done. And then, people like that when he came back and paid us back he got a job eventually he paid us 200 back. So it just has been self propagating since March of 2020 or April of 2020 when we started it.
When that first realtor and that first massage therapist got kinda affected by Covid and. And it's maintained ever since. I don't even think I've mentioned it in a newsletter for a long time. , and it's still just, patients still know about it, put money into it, but every now and then when I do a newsletter, I will say, something about how we were able to use it.
And we always send a thank you note. I mean, Some people just put their change in there and that's, like maybe they bought some medicine and they throw a five, but, you know, we try to notice if someone puts like a hundred or 50, send a thank you note. We create a little receipt thing. The thing is, it's not technically a charity.
It's a separate bank account. And I'm very transparent with the patients about that because I don't really have the ability in me right now in time to run, I don't even what it's called, is it called a Whatever a charity is with all, everything that's involved. So in my newsletter everywhere, I'm like, this is just a separate bank account with its own number and its own name.
But it's not technically like a tax write off because I just don't have that ability and people don't care. They still donate to it. So it's amazing what yeah, how generous people are. That's all I have to say. So cool.
And in a world sometimes where we're flooded by, overwhelming news and sad news, I think that's an awesome thing to highlight.
. And for those listeners who are interested, go ahead and check out Dr. Glover's accompanying blog and you can see pictures of her helping hand star. So thank you so much for sharing about that Now.
In terms of your practice, you've touched on your members, you've touched on the the difference that your practice brings to the eyes of medical students who see how to practice as a family physician, who has the time to, Now getting into more of the specifics of how you run your clinic two things that I wanna touch on.
I, I wanna touch on one that I really love because it contributes to the culture of your clinic and you have a weekly meeting. What does the weekly meeting look like for you? Do you structure your weekly meetings and has it changed over
time?
Yes, I do structure my weekly meetings. So I have this. It's a standing agenda just to remind us of what topics to talk about. And if there's one we don't need to talk about, we just skip through it. So it's not like I'm typing up a new thing every time. We just go down and over time I put things in different orders, added things in, taking things out.
So it does change over time, but it is a great structure. So I do have 2.4 FTE's worth of people supporting me. It's one full-time ma. I have two nurses who do a kind of a job share. They each do two days a week. And then I have an admin that's three days a week. So yeah, add all that up, it's what, four people?
Two and a half fts worth of job, but even when I just had two, my husband, like part-time and my first ma, you need time to just sit around when phone calls aren't happening. People aren't walking in. When I think of something that I wanna say to a person, there's feedback you can give in the moment of course, but you realize, oh, I need to make a point instead of telling that person right then. And it's not maybe the most important thing to say right then, but it's important that we fix some process or something for the future.
I type it in a little fake chart we have in Elation and we named the name of the chart weekly meeting. So the first name is weekly and the last name is meeting. And I learned that from Brie Seatbelt up in Denver cuz she had the fake chart named weekly meeting. And I just write a little non-visitor note in there and I write.
What we need to talk about at the meeting. And so that I can tell all four people at once and vice versa. I give them a chance to, you know, bring things up too. We start like out with, passing cards around assigned for patients and business associates and brainstorming about who, because people have heard different things during the course of the week.
Oh, we heard so-and-so's getting hip surgery or whatever. So we do that. We, I have my vision and mission on there, especially when I have a new employee. I go over that every week for two months straight. Then it stays printed on there. But I don't always hit it every time or once in a while I randomly feel like I wanna hit it, we discussed leave coordination and all of that. We have birthdays and personal celebrations and check-ins and kudos and celebrations of wins to share, which we try to remember, or you plug it into the weekly meeting, fake chart so we can remember. Because a lot of times by the time you get there, you're like, I know I had a kudos and I forgot.
Status of the practice and any goals. I have that on here to discuss like once a month. And we look in hint and we look at our growth and what do we wanna be doing? How we're bringing on and confirming new memberships is on here cause it's changed over time. So we have to reiterate remember we were doing this, but now we're closed and now we're reopening, but we're doing it this way.
And then we have an OSHA topic presented by my admin person. We have an OSHA binder and we do a 10 question quiz once a year. And then we just like go through the little sections throughout the year. And because I do have employees and if you have employees, you have to follow osha.
It's a law. And I always heard do not get caught with the unopened OSHA binder on the shelf issue. Cause like people buy the three $50 OSHA binder or whatever, and then it's just on their shelf and they never do anything with it. And that's not cool if you get inspected. .
We talk about privacy and privacy law discussions. So just when things come up like, oh, by the way, like this patient they got, separated from their spouse and then like we have to know what if he calls about the kids and she calls about the kid. So we talk about privacy and priv like every time I ask is there any privacy issues that have come up, and I feel like that's our ongoing privacy law training too. And hipaa, I don't really like the word HIPAA cuz there's more privacy law than just hipaa. But anyway, that's our hipaa, ongoing HIPAA training. We talk about medical supply orders, lab supply orders, and office supply orders because I offloaded those.
So I have a nurse who does med supply orders. I have another nurse who does the, they're both two day week nurses who does like the orders from Quest labs, like what blood tubes do we need and throat culture swabs, and then the admin person does like the office supplies, like we need more reams of paper, and.
There just got to be a point in my life with the amount of patients I have, I just, I don't have time to do that. So I offloaded that to them and they do a great job and we all talk about it. I still, order supplies once in a while, but the book is my nurse. But sometimes it, as an owner, you just googling around and you gotta find new stuff, and then we have a no gossip policy on here in a no hostile worker patient environment policy on here. That came from an issue with an employee that I had once. And and also I learned a little bit from Dave Ramsey's Entree Leadership course. And he has a NOCO policy that he recommends, and That is, nobody talks negatively about processes or, including the patients, clients or business associates other than to someone who can help try to make a difference, which is usually, whoever's above you.
And also not talking negatively about team members other than to a leader in an inappropriate private setting. It's a small clinic , so we mostly don't have this problem, but I actually did once. I have great people. But once I had a problem I'm like, all right, it's a policy and even if I don't read it every time, it's right on there.
And then the no hostile worker, patient environment policy. And that's also my employee handbook. Of course, no hostile work environment toward people of protected classes. But then also we had someone creating a negative re intense hostile work environment once for another employee. So I was like those are fireable offenses, I just leave those on here so everyone knows our culture, but , That keeps us organized and sometimes we have to throw it out the window. Like in the middle of Covid, we were like, oh my gosh, we need to talk about like monoclonal administration process right now.
And that's gonna take most of the time or whatever. Sometimes you deviate, but I even have it if everyone's not there. If there's only two of us there, it's still a nice protected time to talk. So I highly recommend a weekly communication battle rhythm if you have at least two people in your practice or more.
And it's protected because you think, I don't need to have this since it's only me and one other person. I actually think it's good. And we do it at the beginning of an afternoon. It should not be at the end of an afternoon. It will never happen cuz everything slides downhill at the end of the day or at the beginning of a morning.
But I feel like beginning of mornings are busier, like people have called overnight. I don't know, there's, so for us it works. Beginning of the afternoon before clinic patients start for the afternoon. And that day that I do mine is Wednesdays. And I take off Wednesday mornings and then come in and have a meeting.
And then I have a very short day of patients after that, just like two and a half hours of patients. So that's my Wednesdays, my half days off a week. And
for your meetings, how long are they?
It's one hour. So there was a time we purposely made it longer at the beginning, like at Covid, know, there's just so many things we were doing, car swabs all of that.
So we . Went to an hour and a half for some time, but then we brought it back down to an hour once we, we didn't need that anymore. We always have more to say, but ideally an hour. I think that's enough, honestly. And
in between meetings, in addition to having weekly meeting as a chart, which I think is a super awesome, helpful tip.
Thank youre, yeah, absolutely. Do you guys have a way of communicating or do you use spruce to communicate amongst each other? For one-off things in between weekly meetings.
We have another fake chart called office messages and that's the name of the person. And so we'll communicate in that.
And this came because I don't use spruce in a very expanded way like some people do there are other people out there who use spruce so much differently than me. And that's another thing when people post about how they use like what they do you can't even always extrapolate that to yourself cuz you don't really know how their clinic functions or how they're using tools.
Cuz tools can be used in so many different ways, and the way I use mine is probably not very much like how other people use first. , but we can communicate through there. But usually it starts off with a patient and us communicating about the patient through there a little. We don't have the integration of spruce with indu inhalation actually.
So that's why I was like, it might be hard to extrapolate to other clinics. But so yeah, we communicate through office messages, our fake patient annul. .
And another detail I wanna ask about with your practice, because you've posted about this is something that I'm sure more than a handful of listeners can relate to, but can you speak to the elusive completed note for your patient?
Yeah, so I of all things, I do still hate writing notes. And I found no matter, and obviously we still have a lot of patient contacts per day. They could be through portal or phone or whatever as well as in person, but. I apparently am gonna always prioritize writing notes last. And so if there's like, oh, I could find this new, like pharmacy label paper right now, or finish a note, then I'm like, oh, I'm gonna Google a pharmacy label paper, you know, or whatever.
Anything else. And there are a lot of things to do as a business owner. I realized I have to do notes first because it's the thing I hate the most. And then the longer you don't do them, the longer they take and then they are the thing that weighs the most on me. It makes me not a good mom at home or not a good life because this is weighing on, and my brain can't get off the fact that they're out there, but then I can't make myself do at home either.
So I was like, all right, that's the thing I have to do. And I listened to some coaching thing and I so think the nice lady who put it out there and it was free. And just from that one coaching thing, I just started saying okay, this has got to be first. And I tell myself, I do literally, and I still do, I have to tell myself, you can do this.
Like you can do this note. And I'll like literally still wanna squirrel away toward anything else. And then I'm like no, you can do this, Jamie, you can do this. Note, Jamie, you can do this . And then I do it so I can keep up with my notes. But then I have realized it's harder to keep up with results, but that is something that doesn't weigh on my mind as much.
Now I do triage results and this is everything in the queues. It's not just results, whatever items are in your queue or whatever your EMR calls your queue. But of all the things in the queue, I. I can handle doing those other ones later. I cannot handle doing my notes later. So I have forced myself to do those first now, and it's helped me a lot.
And now I'm not behind. So they're almost never not done at the end of the day. And once in a while, maybe the second day, but mostly not. So do those first. It's still hard even in DPC to do your notes , but they're shorter and easier notes. No, no review of systems. It's all in the H B i, no coding.
But still you doesn't matter if you're DP C or not, you can find plenty of other things to do instead in your notes. So it's it can still be a problem for some of us.
Well, I will say a huge congratulations to the fact that you have found a system that works for you to finish your notes. And another huge congratulations because you're going on your sixth year.
So thank you so much Dr. Glover, for joining us today.
Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate what you're doing. Maryal.
Next week look forward to hearing from Dr. Neil Ponchal of Paging Dr. Neal, which serves the New York City Metro and New Jersey areas. If you've enjoyed the podcast and you haven't yet done so, subscribe today and share the episode with a physician you may know who needs to hear about D P C. We have a five star review on Apple Podcast and on Spotify now as well as it helps.
To find all these DPC stories. Lastly, be sure to follow us on social media at my DP C story. If you're wanting to continue learning more about dpc in the meantime, check out DPC news.com. Until next week, this is Maryal Concepcion.
*Transcript generated by AI so please forgive errors.
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