Direct Primary Care, or DPC, is an innovative way of providing primary care—geared towards helping people stay healthier and potentially save money on healthcare. Patients within a DPC practice receive ongoing primary care from their doctor with zero copays, convenient scheduling, discounted prices on many blood tests, and even their doctor's personal cell number. It's like having a doctor in the family.

So how is this possible?

Easy: direct primary care practices cut out middlemen like insurance companies, freeing themselves to provide great care without incurring many of the administrative costs of traditional healthcare. Instead of having an insurance company in the middle of the patient-doctor relationship, direct primary care serves the patient directly.

If you're tired of high copays, insane wait times, and rushed 8-minute doctor visits, join Dr. Payton Skawinski in his mission to improve the state of American healthcare.

My greatest fear in medicine is having one of my loved ones get sick and not receive quality care. Or worse, receiving inadequate or error-ridden care that causes harm.

From this fear—and real-life experience witnessing my grandparents, mom, and siblings receive inadequate care—grew a vision. The product of that vision is Bridge Primary Care, a grassroots primary care clinic where I devote all of my energy to providing you the care I would give my family.

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Payton Skawinski, MD
Bridge DPC
Bainbridge Island Primary Care Doctor
425-739-5302

Bridge DPC is a relic of a past generation's patient-doctor relationship. By removing the barriers (and costs) of dealing with insurance and all administrative costs - including the costs of paying hospital CEOs millions of dollars - we are able to give power back to the patient.

This power is realized in multiple avenues:

- With a DPC doc, you have dierct access to your personal doctor, through text, calling, video visits, and home visits. No more calling a clinic, leaving a message and being called back by a doc, NP, or PA who is NOT your primary and knows nothing about you.

- Appointments are as long as they need. DPC doctors are not required to see 20 patients per day like in traditional primary care practices. We structure our days around our patients and build in flexibility to respond to their needs. A typical visit at Bridge DPC will be anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, the polar opposite of the rushed 5-15 minute visits at traditional offices.

- Same day or next day visits with your personal PCP (Dr. S.). There are no long wait times to get in to see your doctor. 

- You will always see Dr. Skawinski. No more disjointed visits with providers you have never met, who haven't the slightest clue of your medical history or what makes you YOU.

Payton Skawinski, MD

Bridge DPC

Bainbridge Island Primary Care Doctor

The essential element of a quality partnership is the mutually beneficial nature of that partnership. Our current healthcare system is far from that. Patients feel slighted: they are often treated as a number or corporate metric instead of a person; they are rushed through visits, have limited access to their personal doctor, and often avoid seeking out care. This is in part due to a system that pushes doctors to see more and more patients in order to meet the bottom line.

Grassroots direct primary care practices are often small businesses owned and operated solely by a local physician with a vested interest in helping a community thrive. These practices cut out the middlemen (insurance, hospital administration) and give power back to the patient. By cutting out the middleman, precious time and resources are redistributed toward strengthening the patient-doctor relationship. The power of developing that foundational relationship is realized through greater access to your doctor, appointments that aren't rushed, easy communication with your doc, and ultimately the peace of mind of knowing that you have an advocate who will fight for you in our unnecessarily complex, wasteful healthcare system.

Direct primary care has an incredible number of benefits for the patients (and thereby their doctors) who decide to embark on this journey; doctors and patients equally benefit from spending more time with each other. With more time, doctors can get to know each of their patients on a deep level and, by learning their history, better understand the root of a problem and treat the whole person instead of putting band-aids on issues. With more time, doctors do not have to be rushed to come up with quick treatment plans; deep thought can be put into each problem, research and literature searches can be done, education and dedicated follow-up can be provided, and problems can be worked through thoughtfully. With more time, doctors get to develop real, trusting, long-lasting, and caring relationships with their patients.

I hope you consider joining Bridge DPC or any other direct primary care practice in the country as we take baby steps to evolve healthcare, one patient at a time. Thank you for joining me in this journey, and I hope that I can be a steady pillar of support in the community of B.I. and North Kitsap County, and eventually, with advocacy, leave ripple effects on the American medical system as a whole.

This is one of the most common questions I get about direct primary care.

So what about insurance? You should still have it.

I think of health insurance the same way I think about car insurance—you want it there for the big, expensive, unexpected stuff. Hospitalizations, surgery, cancer treatment, emergencies. But using insurance for every routine primary care visit is a little like using your car insurance to pay for an oil change.

Your Bridge Primary Care membership covers your primary care here without copays or additional charges for office visits. You can still use your health insurance for things outside of the practice—specialists, imaging, medications, hospital care, and everything else your particular plan covers.

Some people pair DPC with a high-deductible health plan. Others keep the insurance they already have. There isn't one combination that makes sense for everybody, and I don't think it's fair to say that joining a DPC practice will automatically save you money. It depends on your insurance, your medical needs, your medications, and how you use healthcare.

But honestly, the part of DPC that excites me most isn't the potential cost savings. It's getting insurance out of the room when I'm taking care of you. I don't need an insurance company deciding how long your appointment should be, whether we have time to talk about nutrition or exercise, or whether it's worth spending another 20 minutes trying to figure out what's actually going on.

And when you do need care outside of my office, I'm still your doctor.

If you're seeing a specialist, dealing with a new diagnosis, trying to understand a test result, or coming home from the hospital with a stack of paperwork and no idea what just happened, I want you to call me. Part of my job is helping you navigate all of that.

Healthcare is complicated enough. Primary care shouldn't make it more complicated. That's a big part of why I started Bridge Primary Care in the first place.

Payton