Integrity Medicine pays patient for doctor referral

Integrity Medicine, 715 Medical Center Drive Suite 200, has been doing things a little differently for years, ditching the health insurance model in 2017 in favor of "Direct Primary Care."

Patients pay a monthly subscription fee to Integrity Medicine, rather than health insurance premiums.

"Over 85% of our patients have some form of insurance or health cost sharing plan. The medical insurance model has created frustration, hidden cost, and long wait times," said Dr. Robert Roeser, founder of Integrity Medicine. "It also changed medical care from a professional service industry to one of wealth creation where patients are the means of production and physicians and nurses are treated as employees of the insurers. No one should have barriers between them and good, personalized medical care so we adopted the Direct Primary Care model, and this has made all the difference."

He chose to look at the business model differently. And he kept looking at things differently — including how to recruit doctors to a practice that started growing.

The practice opened a satellite office in Andover, and both locations were needing another physician to keep up with demand.

After talking with a recruitment firm, Dr. Roesser chose to go a different direction — talking with his patients instead.

"I decided to ask our patients for help in a newsletter," Roesser said. "They know us well. They know our system and they know our culture. I asked them to send me names of physicians that they would recommend. Doctors that would fit us and that our patients would like to see if one of us was on vacation or a mission trip."

And he made a promise to his patients — if they were successful in helping find a new doctor, he'd pay.

Patient Bo Koehn was one of the first to give a referral, offering his big sister Leah Inman. Overall the practice received about a dozen referrals for possible doctors.

After an interview and conversations, Inman joined the practice.

About a year later, she is still there. And that resulted in Koehn receiving a $5,000 check.

"[I promised] If I hired the doc and they were in good standing one year later, I would pay the referral fee directly to that patient," Roeser said. "… I was honored to present the finders fee to Bo. You don't just throw $5,000 at a problem, but sometimes it helps. It was a good deal to everyone involved."

Dr. Inman grew up in Galva and received her undergraduate degree at Kansas State University. She then attended Des Moines University in Iowa for medical school and completed her internal medicine residency in Spokane, Washington. She spent five years working for a non-profit company in Gig Harbor, Washington as one of their outpatient internal medicine providers before joining Integrity Medicine.