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Frontier Direct Care pitches direct primary care to Starr County commissioners
Summary
Frontier Direct Care presented to the Starr County Commissioners Court proposing a direct primary care and direct contracting model it says can reduce county medical and pharmacy costs while keeping care local.
Frontier Direct Care told the Starr County Commissioners Court on Monday that its direct primary care, direct contracting and direct pharmacy model can reduce the county’s health-care spending while keeping payments in the local medical market.
The presentation matters because county employee health-care costs represent an ongoing budget pressure and commissioners are considering options to reduce long-term claims and pharmacy spending.
Executive Vice President of Growth Joe Wilson introduced Frontier and summarized the company’s three-part approach. “What we do ultimately centers around three core tenets of a business model that delivers massive savings to companies on their employee benefits through delivering proactive direct primary care,” Wilson said. He described (1) shared-site direct primary care clinics; (2) direct contracting for specialty care, which the company says can secure lower cash prices; and (3) an in-house direct pharmacy offering “a thousand free generic drugs mail order, no cost to the county, no cost to the member.”
Wilson said Frontier handles “about 90 percent of somebody’s lifetime health care needs” through primary care and chronic-disease management and that specialist care represents a smaller fraction of total spend. He offered an example comparing a prior annual per-member spend in McAllen of about $561 per member per month to $361 the first year Frontier participated in that employer plan, saying the vendor “guarantee[s] the savings” and will “pay you a check for the difference” if benchmarks are not met.
When asked where the company is based, Wilson said, “We’re based out of Harlingen. We were founded in 2018 here in Harlingen.” He also said Frontier employs local specialists when possible and attempts to “keep health care dollars local and incentivize and grow the actual gross domestic product of this area.”
On the structure of the offering, Wilson said counties would retain their existing commercial insurance and Frontier would “bolt onto the side of it,” providing free primary-care visits at Frontier clinics for members enrolled in the program while coordinating specialty care on a cash or contracted basis.
Commissioners did not take action during the presentation. No contract, pricing schedule, or implementation timeline for Starr County was provided during the meeting.
The presentation closed after questions from commissioners and the court moved on to the next presenter.
