Direct Primary Care and Lifestyle Medicine: Alex Sommers’ Prescription for Employer Health Plans

And of course, I've seen you that you are a big believer of, you know, lifestyle medicine, along with primary care.

When you're especially speaking with employers, where do you see like, they have completely like, they're spending a lot of money, which really shouldn't be.

And, and what do they still don't get it?

Yeah, I became very interested in the space, as you know, and you follow on LinkedIn as well.

I appreciate that.

There's this clinical delivery system.

There is this financial delivery system that the employer is the fiduciary to.

So they buy benefits on behalf of themselves and the employee to provide a health care service to the employee.

their population and their dependents that elect coverage.

It's a challenging topic and distilling that down takes, you know, I think takes a nuanced approach to your audience that you're speaking to.

The answer, though, really boils down to something called Occam's razor, right? You know, sometimes it's the simple answer.

That's the obvious answer.

And so we focus on a whole person centered model.

Implicitly, I think patients don't want to have to access health care service.

Patients don't want to have to access health care service.

They want to be healthy.

So I'm really excited about moving upstream about that.

articulating things that didn't happen to employers, like prevented heart attacks, reverse diabetes.

I just had a conversation with one of our employer clients who was local, and I said, I don't really know how to put in an ROI table how we took this two diabetics in our first four months of taking care of your population, and we took them from hemoglobin A1Cs of 13 and 15, And through an evidence-based clinician-led approach using the powerful tools, which, you know, as Dave Chase has talked about, if we could put something like lifestyle medicine in a pill, it would be the most blockbuster drug or intervention of the century.

We've grown up in block this, augment this, and recommending pills and procedures.

And so these two patients with new onset diabetes, and there are quite a few of them walking around that don't know they have it, We used the powers of lifestyle medicine with nutrition, physical activity, stress reduction, restorative sleep, social connection, and avoiding risky substances, focusing heavily on nutrition, mainly plant-forward nutrition.

Those two diabetics in the span of eight to 12 weeks were off all their medications.

In fact, they only started one medication, metformin, and they became normalized for a blood sugar, weren't even the pre-diabetic range, in 8 to 12 weeks.

And so that's not really something you can put on an ROI table because they never were in the conventional system of getting a medication like a GLP-1, other more expensive diabetic medications, or insulin to bring them back to a normal range.

And so we want to articulate and embed healthy in that whole person-centered model.