Dr. Douglas Iliff has spent the past 40 years caring for patients in his private family practice in the Fleming Place shopping center on Gage Blvd. He also spent time at Minor Med urgent care in the same building, treating walk-in patients for everything from colds and cuts and scrapes to routine injuries and physicals.
This year, Dr. Iliff is transitioning out of his family practice, leaving it in the capable hands of Blaire Helgeson, DNP, APRN, FNP-C. This will give him the time to pursue a new medical concept at Minor Med that he has considered for the past 15 to 20 years--direct primary care.
What is direct primary care? The cost of medical care continues to rise much faster than inflation. Ideally, everyone should have insurance, but many individuals and small businesses find it unaffordable. Lacking coverage, patients skip essential preventive care and struggle with unexpected medical emergencies, highlighting the need for affordable options.
That is where the concept of direct primary care comes into play.
"The concept is simple," says Dr. Iliff. "It's for people who don't have insurance or people who have very high deductibles and would like to have a relatively conservative monthly subscription fee for which they get a package of services. That package of services depends on the individual direct primary care. In our case, it would be everything that I do in my normal family practice, or that Minor Med does after hours, such as suturing, biopsies, all the lab work we do for routine physicals, and just general maintenance care and preventive medicine, which is the thing I've always been most interested in."
For a monthly fee, Minor Med direct primary care patients receive scheduled preventive care visits or unscheduled urgent care at no cost. The monthly subscription fees range from $30 to $90, depending on the patient's age, plus a one-time enrollment fee of $100. Covered tests and procedures include the most common bloodwork for lipid, thyroid, and metabolic profiles; urinalysis; strep, flu, and Covid tests; EKG; treadmill stress test; 24-hour blood pressure; biopsies; and x-rays. Some laboratory tests, immunizations, and prescriptions are not covered.
Patients will always speak to a person when they call during regular office hours. Dr. Iliff notes, "I hate phone trees. Especially the ones that say, 'If this is an emergency, call 911,' followed by numerous other choices. When someone calls, they always get a person, usually someone who knows them well. That's an important feature of our building, in contrast to corporate practices."
Dr. Iliff graduated from the University of Kansas Medical School in 1974. He worked his way through college as a sports correspondent for the Kansas City Star and joined the army to pay for medical school. His residency in family practice was at Womack Army Hospital, Fort Bragg, NC, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Faculty Development Program (1979).
He came to Topeka in 1980 not to set up a medical practice, but to join six other young couples in starting Cair Paravel Latin School. During that time, he worked as an emergency physician at Stormont-Vail until starting his private practice.
Dr. Iliff says, "Originally, back when I was in medical school, I thought that I probably wouldn't practice until I was in my 50s and then, having made enough to retire on, I could go do the things I really enjoyed. A lot of things happened along the way, and I found that what I really enjoyed was being a family physician.
I've wanted to do direct primary care for a long time because I love the model. We're now well-equipped to deal with a variety of problems. We've got Minor Med for urgent care issues for anybody. Otherwise, we have regular primary care with Dr. Helgeson for insured patients and Minor Med primary care by subscription for those who want direct primary care."
To learn more about Minor Med's direct primary care, visit minormedtopeka.com/primary-care.