FAQ’s – Frequently Asked Questions

First of all “Primary Care” usually refers to Pediatrics, Gynecology, Adult Medicine (or Internal Medicine), and Urgent Care.  This category comprises about 90% of all healthcare encounters in the US.  Some primary care doctors also specialize in other areas of medicine. Direct Primary Care (DPC) means that you receive primary care services without co-pays or other additional barriers that are typically found on conventional insurance plans.

Cloud Medical DPC is not insurance.  It is a monthly membership program that provides primary care medical services.  This includes 24/7 access to your personal physician, with no copays and virtual access via text, cell, email, and video.  Basically, you’re signing up to have a completely different relationship with a healthcare provider that you can truly call your “personal physician,” someone who is devoted to your health around the clock, no matter what happens, no matter where you happen to be, and no matter when you need the help.

It’s a vastly different relationship than a conventional medical model where everything revolves around “what is covered and what isn’t covered.”  Your membership also includes office-based procedures like skin surgeries, joint injections, suture repair, wound care, and the casting and splinting of broken bones.

At the Cloud Medical offices, we also perform bio-identical hormone implants, complicated joint injections and aspirations, PRP, skin cancer surgeries, and lots of other services that usually fall under the specialty banner of “sports medicine”, “functional medicine”, “anti-aging medicine”, “naturopathy”, “genomic medicine”, “endocrinology”, “dermatology”, etc.

Always-On Direct Primary Care.  Cloud Medical DPC allows us to spend more time with you whenever you need us: during business hours, evenings, nights, weekends, when you’re traveling, or when you’re too busy to come into the office; in other words, when life actually happens.  For instance, if you’ve come down with a sinus infection while traveling in Katmandu, no problem!  Just text, call, email, or even video-conference your personal doctor, and get the help you need right away.  And since we don’t have to deal with conventional insurance protocols, like being limited to certain medical networks, we can provide and arrange for medical assistance anywhere, no matter where in the world you are.

Your personal physician becomes your go-to healthcare guru, guide, advocate, champion, scout, and Sherpa.  We are committed to getting you the answers you need, and in much less time than what you’re used to.  We know the healthcare system inside and out, so when you need something done, we make it happen, and FAST.

• Immediate access to our providers for acute issues, and quick responses for non-urgent matters.
• Fast-track MRI’s
• Quick and easy prescription refills

We are “outside the box” physicians who are passionate about keeping up to date with the most cutting-edge advances in healthcare.  Are you a biohacker?  You will love us.  Are you more interested in natural approaches first, and prescription drugs only when other options have failed?  Welcome to the Cloud!  Are you one of those people who wonder why the healthcare system has so much in common with the DMV?  That’s why we exist: to change all of that.  Do you find the advertisements and campaigns by big insurance companies — about how much they “care about you” — to be very different than what you experience when you actually need something from them?  Give us a try.  You’ll see.

As an option to help you create an all-inclusive healthcare plan that meets your specific needs, we work with HealthShare organizations that offer innovative programs which perfectly dovetail with our Cloud DPC model.  Please note however, that these HealthShare organizations operate separately and independently from Cloud DPC.

The HealthShare programs work like this:  The burden of high-cost healthcare expenses such as hospitalizations, surgeries, specialist visits, etc. is ‘shared’ among like-minded, health-oriented individuals via the HealthShare’s own payment systems.  For many people, the monthly costs for HealthShare is literally half of any conventional insurance plan they can get on the Health Exchange.

By having memberships in both Cloud DPC and the HealthShare organization of your choice, you get the best of both worlds:  our concierge-level service for all of your primary care, and the financial management of high-cost health catastrophes handled by the HealthShare organization.

If you would like to learn more about the current HealthShare models available, here are three links to external sites with more information.

Best Healthshare Plans Comparison Guide 2023

6 Best Health Sharing Plans

The Best Healthshare Plans in 2023 [Ranked & Compared]

No problem, just call our main number after hours to reach our on-call provider, and we’ll help you with your non-life-threatening medical emergencies.

Shall we count the ways?  For starters, Cloud DPC is not medical insurance. 

We know that Conventional Insurance is appropriate for major catastrophes, like floods, fires, and tornadoes, and we are most assuredly in accord with Life, Auto, and Homeowner’s Insurance to protect you against these types of major expenses.  But Direct Primary Care is about your health disasters, plus so much more.

DPC is about relationships, trust, access, and having someone who will be an ever-present guide through the myriad health issues that can arise.  For instance, it’s often the case that a small problem can be handled very quickly and easily if you have immediate access to your primary care doc.  (Think asthma attacks, bee stings, lacerations, earaches, broken bones, panic attacks, bad infections, road rash, changing moles, etc.).

It’s when you don’t have quick access to your primary care doctor that the relatively small things can become very serious—very quickly.  That’s why we maintain an “always on” policy.  When you’re a member of Cloud Medical DPC, we handle all of your primary care needs, completely and independently.  We do not obtain any reimbursement from your chosen HealthShare organization, or any other insurance company, for that matter.  We manage our relationship with you without interference from any “third party.”

In the conventional healthcare model, insurance companies completely dictate the dynamics, so your doctor doesn’t really work for YOU, because the doctors are bound to work for them—or through them.  They have to ask for approval to get almost anything done for you, and this process usually takes weeks, or longer.

Have you ever gotten frustrated with your doctor because it’s taking such a long time to have an MRI scheduled, or some other procedure?  Most of the time it’s because their staff is on the phone, sometimes literally for hours, trying to get a “prior authorization” because the insurance company keeps denying approval for what you need.  With DPC, this is never the case.

In the conventional healthcare model, it’s also a constant battle for your doctor’s office to get paid for their services after taking care of you.  Someone once calculated the total number of ‘billing-related steps’ it takes from the time you leave the doctor’s office to when they receive payment, which is always weeks or months later: twenty-seven.  Twenty-seven steps!

Conventional healthcare is one of the most inefficient industries in America.  The required bureaucratic procedures might be okay if we were talking about something as life-changing as a heart transplant, but for primary care services, it is, and always has been, an inefficient and complicated way to operate.  DPC is so much simpler, and so much more efficient and effective!  We never have to worry about co-pays, prior authorizations, denials, or “if this or that is covered.”  The only things we are concerned with are taking the best possible care of you, in the shortest amount of time, and in ways that benefit you the most.

DPC is literally transforming healthcare in the US, and if you want to learn even more about this new model, check out this article.

Absolutely, and this is where we really shine.  When you enroll your business, we immediately get to work assessing your employees, not only as individual patients (our #1 priority) — but also as a population, to see if there are any angles that we can help your company with — from a ‘group wellness’ perspective.  This is a fully customized course of action; one in which we will discuss all of the options in detail with you.  Most of this customization can be done at no additional cost. 

Even if you already have a wellness committee or an HR department in charge of your company’s healthcare, we will seamlessly integrate with your existing programs and take a big load off their shoulders.  We love making HR executives happy!

We do provide concierge-style service, but our prices are lower than just about any other healthcare model in the U.S., so “concierge” is not really a complete descriptor of who we are.  Our mantra is “Superior primary care for the most cost-effective price possible.”  The following list details why this mantra is the foundation of our service.

1.  We are not satisfied with the status quo.
2.  We are insiders who know the healthcare system inside and out.
3.  We are healthcare policy experts who have been invited to speak at the White House about the future of healthcare, and who have spent many days on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., campaigning for true, meaningful reform.
4.  We are visionaries, and are happy to lead the way forward when others seem lost in the quandary.
5.  We love to innovate and solve complicated problems with productive solutions.
6.  We believe in win-win-win: You win, We win, Society wins.
7.  We are inspired by all of the rockstar paradigm-shifters and revolutionaries who live in our midst here in Boulder county.
8.  We believe in Conscious Capitalism.
9.  We believe in local solutions based on real people, real relationships, real experiences and real outcomes.
10.  We are allergic to counterfeit deception.
11.  We believe that you should not have to be ultra wealthy to get world-class healthcare.
12.  We believe in fiscal responsibility, sustainability, and bootstrapping rather than constantly asking for more grants, more handouts, and more government funding.
13.  We believe that primary healthcare should remain independent from the medical oligopolies.
14.  We are grateful to be able do what we do…and most of all because we love our patients.

Our Mission is pretty simple:  Be the most advanced, efficient, cost effective, and attentive direct primary care program on Earth.  Yes, this is a lofty goal, but our passion and our excellent team is how we make it happen!

Enrollment for Cloud Medical is currently open.

You may request to join Cloud Medical now. 

CLICK HERE TO REQUEST ENROLLMENT IN CLOUD MEDICAL

Or, click the enrollment button located at the bottom of our Home page, Our Rates page, or on our Get Started page.

Current members may dis-enroll anytime with just a 30-day notice (in writing please).  If you have any other enrollment-related questions, just send us an email at this link.

We do not lock members into a long term contract.  You can cancel at any time by simply sending us an email at stating you need to cancel your membership, a minimum of 30 days prior to your next billing cycle.

If you have any other enrollment-related questions, just send us an email at this link.

No single plan meets everyone’s needs, so you always need to look at the fine print.  Since the HealthShare organizations we work with are are founded upon conscientiousness and integrity, their goal is to incentivize healthy habits—for people of all religions.  

Members of these programs simply ‘share’ their major health care expenses.  They have systems in place that make cost sharing easy, and with total transparency.  Designed for health-conscious individuals, families, and businesses, the organizations that offer these HealthShare programs meet the ACA/IRS requirements, so you can avoid IRS penalties.

Please note: HealthShare programs are designed for people who strive to live healthy lifestyles.  They may not cover medical expenses related to smoking and other behaviors which pose known health risks.  Contact the HealthShare organization for details.

This page will walk you through the process of becoming one of our beloved Cloud members, and find the HealthShare organization of your choice.

We provide onsite phlebotomy services.  We also have a complete onsite Vascular Lab and can perform carotid scans, aneurysm screening, echocardiograms, EKGs, and ABI testing at all three of our locations.

When we are unable to take care all of your healthcare needs in-house, we will refer you to the absolute best specialists in Colorado. Since we are medical industry insiders, we know which doctors are the finest experts in each field, and since we are independent (one of the last ones standing), we have the freedom to send you wherever we believe you will receive the best care for your given medical condition.

We never need to obtain any pre-authorization, because we don’t work with any conventional insurance plans.

Yes.  Ask us about our various E-book publications to learn about our points of view and perspectives about health in the broader sense.  To get your copy of the free e-book, The New Healthcare Manifesto, written by Dr. David Tusek, click here.

No, but…we offer a far better option for most people, and we invite you to join our innovative model.

If you work for a large company and have a great insurance plan, it often includes a high deductible. Many folks in your shoes use our Cloud DPC plan as an “add on” to their high deductible coverage.  For the monthly prices listed below, we offer no copays, and 24/7 nonstop urgent care.

We give you our personal cell phone and email contact info, and are immediately able to work directly for YOU, and not for your insurance company.

The insurance industry creates so many unnecessary requirements, problems and barriers for doctor-patient relationships, which our Cloud DPC program can completely circumvent.

Keep your major insurance plan for catastrophes, but join our Cloud DPC program if you want a completely new experience for your day to day healthcare.

Two reasons:

1. The superior service and patient experience of Cloud Medical DPC
2. Cost savings

When you do the math, if you have a high deductible of several thousand dollars, you pay the full amount of any day to day healthcare expenses out of pocket until you reach that deductible, often at higher prices to boot!  Your insurance doesn’t really “kick in” until after the deductible is met.  So if you haven’t met your $5000 deductible, and you get stitches at the ER, you’ll likely pay several thousand dollars out of pocket just for that visit!

With Cloud DPC, we take care of many medical problems that will keep members from having to go to the ER most all of the time.  Many times, we can even prevent hospitalizations due to the kind of accessibility that we offer.

Of course, if you ever have a life threatening condition or emergency, always call 911.

If you do keep your major medical insurance plan, our goal is to prevent you from ever hitting your deductible by handling all of your direct primary care, without any co-pays, ever.

We find that most of our patients join because they are looking for a different kind of experience with their doctor, and are truly interested in becoming what we call Cloud Optimized: the healthiest possible version of you!