Advanced Primary Care and Direct Primary Care
The Alliance combines Advanced Primary Care and Direct Primary Care to help our employer-members improve their employees’ health care outcomes.

What are the Benefits of The Alliance’s Direct Primary Care Offering?
Employer Benefits
Lowers overall health care costs by referring to high-value specialists only when care can’t be provided at the clinic – producing fewer referrals, tests, and procedures.
Employee Benefits
Lower out-of-pocket costs because care is paid for using a per-employee per-month basis – usually covered by their employer – and more care is kept at the clinic instead of being sent out to costly specialists.
Convenient access for employees with a location at or near their employer with same-day appointments and availability outside of typical clinic hours of operation.
What is Primary Care?
Primary care is the care delivered by clinicians who are trained in family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics. These doctors, nurses, and other primary care staff represent the frontline of medicine by focusing on preventative care. They are in the best position to help patients maintain and improve health, detect, and treat problems early, manage chronic conditions when they occur, and refer patients to the right specialists when needed.
Primary care has a significant impact on patients’ health and the cost of their health care. That impact can vary based on how much time doctors and other caregivers are able to spend with patients, what kind of services they deliver at the primary care office, and where they send people for additional care. Since primary care is typically where an individual’s health care journey begins, it’s an effective place to improve the value of health care.
What is Direct Primary Care?
Direct Primary Care is a type of primary care that’s provided directly to employers or consumers and is independent of a larger hospital system. This type of care utilizes an alternate payment method, most often capitated with a monthly cost. This greatly improves access to high-quality care with a flat, affordable membership fee. Direct Primary Care is almost always accessed through an on-site, near-site, or shared-site clinic.
What is Advanced Primary Care?
Advanced Primary Care is an elevated standard of primary care that’s measured by improved health outcomes for patients, lowered total health spend for employers and employees, and achievement of higher levels of patient satisfaction and activation.
Advanced Primary Care focuses on quality of care and outcomes as opposed to patient volume. This means physicians dedicate more time to each patient, ensure chronic conditions are being managed, and can better coordinate care.
The Alliance’s Advanced Primary Care offering meets the following benchmarks:
Enhanced Access for Patients
- More physician-patient time to allow sufficient time to treat the whole patient.
- A greater range of services, including close collaboration with other practitioners such as behavioral health and PT. It can also include access to x-rays, labs, and prescriptions.
- Timely access to care, including same-day appointments, and availability outside of clinic operation hours.
Evidence-Based Medicine
- Care teams provide tests and treatments based on scientific evidence, avoiding unnecessary care.
- Use of standing orders and protocols for patients with chronic diseases to ensure evidence-based care is reliably delivered.
Risk-Stratified Care Management
- Patient risk is assessed, and a care plan is developed based on their unique needs, such as extended office visits, care manager guidance, monitoring and tracking, phone check-ups, etc.
Care Coordination
- A primary care team that engages in outreach, including chronic condition management; coordination of care; and ensuring patient understanding of medications, orders, adherence expectations, etc.
Care Navigation and Referral Management
- A careful selection of high-value clinicians and facilities to those specialists that can’t be provided at the clinic. The clinic team remains in constant contact with this narrow list of trusted clinicians as treatment plans develop.
Organizational Infrastructure
- Analytical and reporting capabilities to allow employers and providers access to data for informed decision-making, as well as continuous staff improvement and training.
Behavioral Health Integration
- Care teams using patient records to identify those who may need outreach and assess behavioral health needs through multiple methods of connection.
Balanced Compensation
- Rewarding care management team based on quality of care – care quality, patient experience, resource use and referrals – not volume of care. This global payment methodology differs from traditional primary care, which uses fee-for-service payments and third-party payer
Hear what Advanced Primary Care Means to our Members
Featured Insights on High-Value Health Care
The Four Best Benefits of Choosing a Level Funded Health Plan
Employers with healthy workforces are paying needlessly high health care costs, which is why many of them trust us to self-fund their health plans. After all, employers that choose self funding retain savings from things like unused care, utilizing custom provider...
Five Strategies for a Smarter Self Funded Health Plan
Employers are switching to self funded health plans quite rapidly, but the swing from fully insured to self funded health plans did not happen overnight. Health care costs have grown steadily for decades, but they have especially ballooned in recent years. 2022...
How Employers Help Their Employees Avoid Balance BillingÂ
We hosted employers for an action-packed hour to talk about how you can guide your employees to avoid costly balance billing. If you missed the webinar, you can view the recording or read on for a detailed recap of this important topic. Out-of-network claims...