From vaccines to unemployment, the aftermath of the 2020 elections has left many Texans fact-checking misinformation in exchange for truth. San Antonio, like other cities, seeks real healthcare solutions to unemployment in uncertain times and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Direct Med clinic’s Direct Primary Care model is reframing the answers to common questions that are generally tough to answer.
Talk About Texas Radio Show
October 31, 2020, Doctor Program Liason, David Dorrough, and Chief Administrative Officer, Deborah Maldonado, had the chance to represent Direct Med Clinic on the radio station Talk About Texas with Roy Holley. Read the transcript to see how Direct Med Clinic is the answer to Direct, Accessible, Transparent, and Affordable Healthcare in San Antonio.
Michael Smith: I’d like to introduce Mr. David Dorrough. He is with Direct Primary Care. He is the Dr. Program Liaison and has an incredible program that will change the face of how healthcare delivery is promoted here in South Texas. And David, would like you to go ahead and explain everything. Hi, David. Welcome to the show.
David Dorrough: Good to see you.
Roy Holley: We’ve had you on before?
David Dorrough: Yes, sir. Good to be here. It’s great to be back.
Roy Holley: Tell us a little bit about yourself briefly. And how did you come into your job?
David Dorrough: Well, I am a born and raised San Antonio boy. I love living in San Antonio. Venture off here and there, but always come back. I went to high school here a little short time in the Air Force and right back to San Antonio.
Roy Holley: What is it you do with what’s the name of your company? First, it is Direct Med Clinic. OK, and what is that you do for Direct Med?
David Dorrough: I am the Doctor Program Liaison and that fancy name simply means my job is to sit down with business owners and operators and figure out what their health care needs are for their employees.
Roy Holley: Now you have a different model and I think that’s what you call it than the other health care providers. If you could get into explaining what that model is.
David Dorrough: Absolutely. It’s called Direct Primary Care. Well, one of the things that I’ve learned because I don’t come from a medical background is that health insurance doesn’t always translate to healthcare. Under the Direct Primary Care model. Those of us that have lived a while like you, Roy, and myself.
Roy Holley: Well, yeah, you look at me, I’m fallen apart over here!
David Dorrough: We grew up with the family physician. We had direct access to our doctor. My mom could pick up the phone and call Dr. Jensen and get a prescription and get an appointment. That’s what Direct Primary Care is. You no longer have an insurance company in between you and direct access to a doctor. And that is what makes us different. We are not an insurance company. We are a membership clinic. You pay a monthly membership fee and then for ten dollars when you come in, you get to see a practitioner and you get taken care of.
Roy Holley: So how much a fee is it? A month.
David Dorrough: It’s fifty-nine dollars per month per person.
Roy Holley: Per person. So if you got four in your family, it’s four times that.
David Dorrough: Actually, it’s better than that. What we have done is we have capped it at three. So basically the family plans one hundred and seventy-seven dollars and it covers everybody in the family. Yes sir.
Roy Holley: OK, now does it cover everything or is it specific things that are eliminated?
David Dorrough: Well, we obviously it doesn’t cover everything because we’re not a hospital and there are times that people might need hospitalization.
Roy Holley: So anything that can be addressed in a clinic setting, that you can do.
David Dorrough: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Roy Holley: Well, so major surgery you’re not going to do there.
David Dorrough: Exactly. We’re not doing any heart transplants at Direct Med, but we can give you a breathing treatment and we can take care of a lot of other things.
Roy Holley: OK, but it’s still a great deal when you look at the dollar amount that it costs. Go to a hospital, unrigged or insurance.
David Dorrough: Yes, sir. And the research shows that a clinic like ours can take care of about 85 percent of what an average person’s needs are medically.
Roy Holley: That’s what I would say. The vast majority of the percentage of the needs you can handle over there.
David Dorrough: Yes, you’re absolutely right.
Roy Holley: Where’s your clinic located? You have one clinic? Yes, sir, we have one. It’s at the corner of Blanco Road and 410, right inside 410. When we say one clinic, people go, oh, you just have one clinic. Well, and one of the things I’ve come to realize is, is in this day and age and especially through. This year of COVID, our virtual care program is strong, and one of the things I’ve come to realize is you do occasionally need a brick and mortar building to go to, but the majority of your needs can be taken care of virtually and our virtual program comes with your membership.
David Dorrough: Oh, that’s great. So you have to pay extra for that? No, sir. It’s an app on the phone. You can go right through the app. You can do virtual.
Roy Holley: How long have you been in business over there?
David Dorrough: We hit three years, I believe, Deb, in December.
Roy Holley: And it’s been fairly successful. And the people that are involved in it are happy because they’re getting a good deal and they’re getting coverage. Because I think a lot of the people that you have this is why I wanted to bring you on. For those of you listening out there that don’t have any health care coverage and you can’t handle that seven or eight hundred dollars a month for your family, the limit is, what, one hundred and seventy-dollars once covered?
David Dorrough: One seventy-seven.
Roy Holley: Covers about approximately about 85 percent of what you need and which is better than nothing.
David Dorrough: Absolutely.
Roy Holley: I mean, it’s a lot better than nothing, especially if you got kids. It’s a heck of a deal.
David Dorrough: Well, and what I would say to that, too, is what people come to find out is, is not only is it affordable but just the idea you actually get direct access to a doctor, to a practitioner. That’s unheard of in the normal health care system today.
Roy Holley: So that’s, I would think, probably the most popular features of what you do.
David Dorrough: It is for my wife and I, because we were the first members in San Antonio we joined.
Roy Holley: So you joined here before you went to work there?
David Dorrough: Yes, sir. We joined two months before the clinic was open to prove Dr. Roger, who’s our founder, that he can’t do what he’s saying, couldn’t be. And basically I joined to prove him wrong. And we’re the biggest believers in San Antonio and I went to work for him!
Roy Holley: That’s great. Well, listen, we’ve got somebody else that you brought along and we’ve had her on the air before. And we were talking we had another lady that was supposed to be here, couldn’t make it. And we were talking. And you brought this name up. And I remembered her from before. We had her on the show before. And her story was so good and so different and so special. And her enthusiasm was so good that I said, we have to bring her on again. Now, she actually is like you. She started off as a customer and now she works there. So you guys have something in common. If you would give her a real nice introduction.
David Dorrough: I sure will even go.
Roy Holley: Yeah, that’s right.
David Dorrough: Actually, a number of the people that now work at the clinic have similar stories of of being part of the clinic as a member prior to joining. But what to do with me today? This lady really makes it happen at Direct Med Clinic. Her name is Deborah Maldonado and she is the Chief Administrative Officer for the clinic. She’s got so many initials after her name, I couldn’t even remember them all. But at this time, I’d like to introduce Deborah Maldonado.
Roy Holley: Deborah, welcome to the show. Bring your microphone about like they’re very good. Now, if you hear David, if you hear anything that we’re talking about, you want to jump in. Go ahead, Deborah. Tell us a little bit about yourself. We’re going to just redo what we did before because it was great. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you first become acquainted with this clinic? And I know there were some very specific needs to just tell your story. Just do what you did before.
Deborah Maldonado: All right. Well, I’m a registered nurse. I’m master prepared. And so I’ve been in healthcare for close to 40 years. About the second week of April in 2018, I got a phone call from my daughter and my daughter was telling me that she was short of breath. She was having an asthma attack and she typical, she needed a breathing treatment. She needed to go to the E.R. And so that’s what she said. So I joined her at the emergency room. And she’s really funny. She says, Mom, the doctor came in. He was in here exactly three minutes. She was counting everything. Anyway, she had a breathing treatment that gave her an injection on the way out the door. She paid 250 dollars. And she was told, I don’t know if you’re going to have another bill. The doctor’s bill is also separate, so we don’t know what he’s going to charge.
And I told him, I said, “how can you not know what they’re going to charge?” “Oh, well, we don’t know what’s what. It’s you know, his is separate. And I don’t know if you’re going to be able if you’re going to end up with another bill from us, it just depends on what they end up coding it as.” So, after 250 bucks we left. During this time, I was also trying to help my husband, who is a small business owner, try to find healthcare coverage for his employees.
And he’s a small employer. The cost of trying to do that was tremendous, you know, and it was even if we paid half of the premiums or whatever percent of the premiums, the chances of our employees being able to pick up their part of it was the difference between paying an electric bill or paying for their medical insurance. So, I was dealing with that and a couple of weeks after the incident with my daughter, she receives a bill for another one thousand three hundred dollars.
Roy Holley: Wow.
Deborah Maldonado: From the clinic, from the urgent care center and another separate bill for eight hundred and fifty dollars for the doctor. So that was a real shocker. In the meantime, I had I came across an interview with Dr. Moczygemba, but he was actually being interviewed on Facebook by another gentleman. And as I was hearing about the program, I thought to myself, I’m a hospital administrator. There’s no way he can do this. I know what healthcare costs.
So I got in my car and I went to the clinic. I wanted to find out, what is it that you’re doing to be able to offer this at this kind of price? Anyway, we met two weeks later. I signed up my husband’s employees. I signed up my daughter. And the cost of just my daughter by herself was even paying a full year’s membership. Plus the doctor. Ten dollar bill. Ten dollars, whenever she went into the clinic was far less than what she had. She had in her hands as a bill from that one visit at Urgent Care Center. So to this day, she’s still a member. And so, of course, our employees are. I was doing nursing consulting at that time and Dr. Moczygemba asked me to come and take a look at his clinic. And before you know it, I’m still here two and a half years later.
Roy Holley: So you went to work for him?
Deborah Maldonado: Yes, I did.
Roy Holley: So it was a fortunate thing for both of you. Yes. Yes.
Deborah Maldonado: And I became so passionate about because I had lived through all of that. I knew exactly how it felt.
Roy Holley: Well, it happened to your daughter.
Deborah Maldonado: Yes. Yes. As an individual and then also as an employer.
Roy Holley: So share some of the stories that you’ve had. I’m sure you meet so many people you don’t have to mention maybe just the first names of people that you’ve helped in some of the different backgrounds of people that have come in that you’ve guys have helped out.
Deborah Maldonado: We had a woman come. Her name was Cindy, and she ended up becoming a member, ended up seeing the doctor, needed some medication that was very, very expensive. When she left the clinic, she had parasites. And so she needed a particular six pills that were very expensive at the clinic. What we did when she called and said, I can’t afford this medicine, I jumped on the Internet. I told her, wait there at the store, and I won’t name the store, at the pharmacy. And I found them. They were charging her two thousand for six pills. So I went in on the Internet, found her some medication. I send it to her phone, the coupon. She got the six pills for twenty-seven bucks. So there’s something wrong.
Roy Holley: And that was just one instance.
Deborah Maldonado: That’s just one. So we try to help our our members, even though it’s not something as the pharmacy part of it, we don’t cover, but we try to help our patients be able to find that very well.
David Dorrough: Yeah. I wanted to jump in there because I want to brag on Deborah and the team that she’s hired and trained because I’m not around the clinic a lot, because I’m the guy out talking that’s up around town, but her and her team go the extra mile. It’s about relationship.
Roy Holley: That’s what it’s all about. Now people are listening. I always say this. They’re listening. How do they reach your clinic? If they want more information, please give them a phone number.
David Dorrough: Absolutely. The phone numbers 210-864-9988.
Roy Holley: That’s one more time.
David Dorrough: 210-864-9988.
Roy Holley: All right. And is there anything else, Deborah, that you want to share before we get out of here?
Deborah Maldonado: Just that it is the best place and I make sure that our patients are taken care of and we are passionate, passionate about what we do.
Roy Holley: David and Deborah, thank you very much for being with us today on Talk about Texas. Thank you.
Recent Comments