Trevor says, “As a nurse practitioner, I sometimes feel that I should not be charging the same fee as a physician. Thoughts on setting price points for patient visits based on your education level. Do you ask patients to work with you for a length of time?”
Chris: Yes, very interesting question, and I don’t think there’s any right answer to this. If you ask 10 different marketing experts even within the field of medicine clinical practice, you’d probably get 10 different responses. The most sort of purely capitalistic response is the fee that you can charge is the fee that patients will pay you, but, of course, there are many considerations there – your level of experience, how long you been treating patients, the demographic and population that you plan to be working with, what kind of services that you’re offering whether you’re offering doing more like a concierge type of model where the depth and level of service you provide might be lower, but you’re going to have a greater panel of patients. I mean, there are many many different things to consider, but as a nurse practitioner, your scope of practice is, of course, nearly that of an MD or a DO. I know many nurse practitioners out here in California, for example, who have an enormous amount of training. They might be specialists, for example, on tick-borne illness, and they’ve been treating patients in that realm for many years. They’re charging rates that are higher than what maybe a general practice functional medicine MD might be charging. I think it more depends on all of those factors that I mentioned more than anything else.
Regarding your second question, do I ask for any kind of commitment? The answer is no, but generally, and again you ask 10 people, and there’ll be 10 different responses here. Although I can see the value of asking people to make a commitment, it doesn’t totally fit with my personality, and I wouldn’t like to be in that situation as a patient. I don’t really ask that of my own patients. I don’t have any problem necessarily with that. It’s a direction I haven’t chosen to go. I’ve found that most people who, by the time they get to see a functional medicine provider and they jumped through the hoops that they need to jump through in order to do that, they’re pretty committed. Most of my patients stick around for quite a while. I’ve had some patients that I’ve been seeing since 2010 when I first started. They might only come back for an annual checkup, but they’re still around. It depends on your situation, but that’s how I feel about it.