There’s a new option available for those in Jefferson City seeking medical care.
Big Tree Medical Home opened a temporary clinic Sept. 1, with a permanent spot now near completion in the same strip mall location at 1850 Southridge Drive.
Jen Wheeler, Big Tree co-founder, said the Columbia-based practice is different from other medical providers by operating as a direct primary care clinic, an alternative payment model that takes a membership-based approach where patients pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited access to primary care and prevention services.
Wheeler and her husband, Adam, launched the business in 2017. She said her husband, a pediatrician in Columbia, felt the community would benefit from the alternative model but failed to find any other area providers willing to take the initiative and start a new clinic.
“He really felt like Columbia, especially, and Mid-Missouri and even our state needed this type of primary care model,” Wheeler said.
When no one else was willing to take on the new project, Wheeler said, she agreed to take the risk with her husband.
“That first month, we only had six patients,” she said.
But the slow start didn’t deter the couple.
“We’re entrepreneurs, so we still were very hopeful that it was going to take off someday, and we just needed to prove the concept,” Wheeler said. “Slowly each month, we got more and more (patients). Now we’ve seen more than 8,000 people.”
And the business has expanded well beyond Columbia. Wheeler said they opened three other new locations in September in Sedalia, Owensville and Bolivar, bringing the total number of clinics statewide to seven.
“I always wanted a Jeff City location because we have lots of patients in Jeff City and they would have to drive (to Columbia),” Wheeler said.
The opportunity to open the Jefferson City location came as the practice began working with area school districts, Wheeler said.
Wheeler said the most important thing to understand about Big Tree is they can get new patients in to see a primary care doctor on the same day as the request is made.
“It’s really hard to find a primary care doctor,” Wheeler said, noting the entire state has a shortage of primary care doctors, with the exception of two counties — one of which is Cole County.
But even in places where there isn’t technically a shortage, it can be difficult to find a primary care physician who is taking new patients. Wheeler said that’s because a doctor can make a lot more money doing almost anything but primary care.
The other main difference with Big Tree, Wheeler said, is it makes no difference whether a patient has insurance. That’s been a big deal for many patients, she said, noting admitting the lack of insurance has become somewhat of a shame for many people.
“It’s been such a relief and a joy to be able to say, ‘It doesn’t matter. We don’t process insurance anyway, we just offer the same low price to everybody,’” Wheeler said.
However, come Feb. 1, the clinics will begin offering a new plan that includes processing insurance, Wheeler said, in order to eliminate other barriers to potential patients.
In addition to primary care services, the clinic offers mental health services, gynecological services, chronic disease management, urgent care and even some emergency care, Wheeler said. The clinic also offers a number of medications free for members, something Wheeler said they began to offer after discovering how cheap they could get certain medications and how much other providers were marking up the cost.
“We just do a lot more than a normal clinic,” she said. “On (the Big Tree) website, there’s a list of over 180 different medications that we just give away for free and sometimes it ends up actually costing us more than the membership that you pay to give that person their meds for free, but it’s worth it.”
Wheeler said she wanted to emphasize the access patients can get with a Big Tree membership, noting it includes 24/7 messaging to allow patients to communicate with their provider after hours.
“It’s hard to sum up what we do because people like us for different reasons,” she said. “By the time adults need help, they needed help a long time ago, and so I like to communicate that we’re affordable and we can see you immediately.”
Wheeler said Big Tree is continuing to grow, as she works on plans for a nationwide expansion, noting they will soon make announcements of clinics opening in new states.
For more information on Big Tree Medical Home, visit bigtreemedicalhome.com.
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