Concierge Medicine Is Booming. Should You Join the VIP Club?

Dr. Jennifer Timmons offers concierge medicine for an annual fee of $40,000. Here, Timmons at her home in Los Angeles. (Photograph by Maggie Shannon)

The membership clubs charge annual fees for access to doctors, extra testing, and perks like an Oura ring. Are they worth the cost?

Key Points

• Concierge medicine, a healthcare model charging annual fees for personalized services, is growing by 4% to 7% annually, with 10,000 to 14,000 U.S. physicians now in such practices.
• Annual fees for concierge practices range from $1,000 to $40,000 for services like extended doctor visits, preventive screenings, and specialist referrals.
• While concierge medicine offers personalized care, studies show it increases health spending by 30% to 50% for patients without a corresponding increase in longevity, and may exacerbate doctor shortages and health disparities.

Jennifer Timmons is no ordinary family doctor. At her practice in Los Angeles, she sees fewer than 50 patients a year, largely by Zoom or at their homes. If they need to reach her after hours, they have her cellphone number. If they want nutrition advice, wellness coaching, or help with complex medical issues, she’s at their beck and call.

For access to Dr. Timmons, patients pay $40,000 a year. That puts her in rarefied territory for a family doctor—most of whom are so harried they barely know their patients individually.

Yet Timmons is a “concierge” doctor, available only to patients who pay an annual membership fee. While she’s at the high end of the field, concierge medicine is thriving—appealing both to doctors and consumers as an antidote to America’s strained medical system.

Concierge practices are like the VIP clubs of healthcare. Charging annual fees, the practices have limited numbers of patients, more personalized services, and doctors who may handle everything from your annual physical to coordinating cancer treatment.

Major hospital groups like Johns Hopkins Medicine and Mount Sinai now have concierge practices. MedStar Health, a big system in the Washington, D.C., area, recently launched a Signature concierge practice.

Republican health policies are favoring concierge practices, including a new tax break in their “big beautiful” law. Starting next year, patients in some direct primary-care practices can use their health savings accounts to pay membership fees, up to $150 a month for an individual and $300 for a family.

For medical practices and hospitals, it makes good business sense. The idea is to create new revenue, turning healthcare into Netflix-like subscription streams. An estimated 10,000 to 14,000 doctors, or fewer than 2% of all U.S. physicians, are now in concierge groups, according to trade publication Concierge Medicine Today*.* The publication estimates growth of between 4% to 7% a year in the industry.

With fewer patients to serve, Dr. Timmons can offer more personalized care. (Photograph by Maggie Shannon)

For patients, concierge medicine offers a cocoon from mounting pressures on the medical system. The federal government, under Republican control, is orchestrating broad cuts to health spending that are likely to affect millions of people once they take full effect in a couple of years. As they course through, they’ll hit a system already struggling with high costs, labor shortages, and other challenges.

Republicans’ more than $900 billion in Medicaid cuts will lead to 7.5 million people losing their health insurance by 2034, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Republicans’ reluctance to extend the extra premium subsidies for “Obamacare” insurance plans—the issue at the heart of the government shutdown—would also mean a loss of coverage for millions of Americans.

The fallout, analysts say, will extend beyond Medicaid and Obamacare patients. Hospitals may be forced to reduce services and staffing due to higher costs for uncompensated care, according to KFF, a nonprofit health research organization. Rural hospitals and practices face perhaps the most pressure.

Concierge medicine offers some insulation for consumers who can afford the annual fees. Whether it’s worth the cost depends on your financial situation and how much you’re willing to spend for premium service. While some studies have found that concierge care improves patients’ health, others suggest that it doesn’t extend patients’ lives even as it raises costs for the U.S. medical system.

Here’s a look at how it works, and some guidelines to consider as more patients and doctors join the concierge crowd.

Premium Healthcare

Concierge medicine dates back to the 1990s, when physicians—sick of insurance hassles and seeing too many patients—started offering their services through club-like membership models.

Annual fees range from around $1,000 to $40,000. The fee typically covers a yearly physical and access to the group’s physicians and other health professionals. Insurance coverage varies; some practices include additional testing that insurance typically doesn’t cover. Some high-end providers, like Timmons, don’t take any insurance.

Many concierge practices promote preventive medicine as a membership benefit. At MDVIP, a nationwide network of more than 1,400 concierge doctors, patients are typically screened for grip strength and gait speed, metrics of well-being that insurers typically don’t cover.

Specialist referrals are another perk. MDVIP, for example, connects patients with top medical centers like the Mayo and Cleveland clinics. Patients must pay for their treatment with insurance or out-of-pocket costs, but referrals smooth their way.

Physicians say they can provide better care in smaller practices. Doctors in traditional practices have just 10 to 15 minutes per patient visit and spend hours each week on insurance paperwork. In a concierge practice, physicians can act more like the family doctors of old—finding specialists, following up with other physicians, even seeing a patient in the hospital and advocating for them.

The personalized touch has largely vanished outside the concierge world. Insurance companies don’t pay primary-care doctors to see patients in hospital; doctors might not know if a patient is laid up with a broken hip or beginning cancer treatment. Many hospitals employ “hospitalists,” a category of physician who checks in on patients they have no history with.

Concierge doctors like Jennifer Timmons offer wellness tips including advice on nutrition. “Food is medicine,” she says.

Timmons advises patients on supplements as part of a broader focus on holistic health.

Timmons says she started her concierge practice in 2022 after burning out as a traditional family doctor. “I was over it,” she says. “I was putting Band-Aids on problems.”

Now she sells her undivided attention and willingness to work her connections to get specialist appointments. Often, she’ll pick up the phone if a client needs, say, a cardiologist. She also conducts research for patients—from cancer treatment to skin care—and dispenses advice that other doctors might not; a patient recently texted to ask if the foundation makeup she was considering was “clean beauty.” (The verdict: It wasn’t, so Timmons recommended an alternative.)

In MedStar’s Signature concierge service, the $7,500 yearly membership includes perks like an Oura “smart ring” to track health data, and access to a nutritionist and athletic trainer. Patients are given the cellphone number of the group’s physician, Dr. Merlene Horan, who previously served as a physician in the White House.

Some patients say the fees are worth it. Bert Gutierrez, 75, turned to his concierge practice, Sollis Health, when a urologist he contacted had a wait time of over a month. Sollis got him an appointment with another urologist the next day.

Now, when he gets painful kidney stones, Gutierrez avoids the overcrowded and chaotic emergency room and heads to Sollis’ serene facility on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “At my age, I think the time, attention—you deserve that,” Gutierrez says. “Concierge medicine offers a better way to manage your health.” Sollis’ fees start at $333 a month.

Clark Bellin, a financial advisor in Lincoln, Neb., says he would consider a concierge practice for his 86-year-old father, who has mild dementia and is losing his hearing. He wants a doctor to take more ownership over his father’s care.

“It just seems like the quarterback is gone,” says Bellin, who often spends hours arranging visits with specialists and coordinating care across hospitals that don’t talk to each other.

Going Overboard?

While patients may not mind if doctors amp up the tests and use high-tech diagnostics, there’s a fine line between doing enough for patients and doing too much.

Dr. Lisa A. Cooper, Bloomberg distinguished professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, did a stint at a concierge practice that offered executive physicals. She left partly because she was ordering a lot of tests that seemed like overkill. “To me, it was an unnecessary use of resources,” Cooper says.

Case in point: the full-body scan touted by celebrities like Kim Kardashian. The scans cost around $2,500 and generally aren’t paid for by insurance. Companies selling the scans promote them as a means of early detection, but the American College of Radiology says there’s insufficient evidence to recommend total body screening for patients with no clinical symptoms, risk factors, or family history.

Dr. Andrea Klemes, MDVIP’s chief medical officer, got a full body scan that turned up a “laundry list” of harmless things, like a cyst in her brain. Ordinary patients who receive such results may get sucked into needless and costly follow-up testing, she says. MDVIP focuses on tests that are “clinically actionable” in its annual wellness program; patients who want additional testing, including scans, can discuss that with their provider, Klemes says.

Timmons still recommends the scans. While they can issue false positives, she says, they occasionally reveal lifesaving findings like an aneurysm in one of her patients, which needed treating. “It’s a risk/benefit analysis that has to be made on a case-by-case basis,” she says.

Other tests offered by concierge practices have more backing by medical research. Spotting cardiac inflammation through a specialized test, for instance, can reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, according to a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of International Medical Research, using data from 286,000 MDVIP patients.

Will Concierge Medicine Help You Live Longer?

Proponents argue that highly personalized medicine is worth the cost in terms of preventing and managing disease. A peer-reviewed study found that Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in MDVIP practices experienced a statistically significant decrease in heart attack and strokes compared with those not in MDVIP practices.

But the kinds of people who can afford concierge practices tend to be wealthier, which is positively correlated to health. The study used ZIP Code data to control for the influence of wealth, but it isn’t a perfect proxy.

A 2023 study in the Journal of Health Economics, using similar methodologies, found that while concierge medicine enrollment corresponded with a 30% to 50% increase in health spending for patients, there was with no change to their longevity, on average. The study also found that wealthier people tend to gravitate toward concierge practices more than sick people—and they enter with lifelong health advantages.

Indeed, if there’s a downside to concierge medicine, it may be societal: higher spending lavished on a privileged minority, fewer physicians for everyone else, and longer waits to see specialists.

Dr. Timmons works out at her home in Los Angeles. (Photograph by Maggie Shannon)

For her part, Timmons knows she’s restricting her services to the ultrarich, so she puts free wellness content on social media.

Doctor shortages have long been a problem, especially in rural areas, and the U.S. will be short some 86,000 doctors by 2036, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Medicaid cuts and other strains on the system may push more doctors to join concierge practices.

“You can definitely say it’s worsening the shortage in certain areas,” Cooper says. If you live in an area without enough doctors and some of those doctors put up gates around their practice, that puts them out of reach for patients who can’t afford to follow.

Cooper thinks the profession is due for a reckoning as concierge practices siphon more doctors and deepen health disparities. “To me, it calls for a broader conversation in our profession about what this means,” she says. “I don’t think we’re having these conversations yet.”

Write to Elizabeth O’Brien at elizabeth.obrien@barrons.com