Should Your Medical Practice Offer a Membership Plan?

A two dentist office in a mid size town called us last winter, worried. Insurance reimbursements kept shrinking, a quarter of the patients walking in had no dental coverage at all, and those uninsured folks tended to show up once, hear the price of a crown, and vanish. The owner asked a question we hear more and more: should we just start our own membership plan? Charge people a flat yearly fee, give them their cleanings and a discount on everything else, and stop depending on insurance to decide what we get paid?

It is a good question, and it is being asked across every corner of healthcare right now. Membership medicine, the broad idea of patients paying a recurring fee directly to their provider, has gone from a fringe experiment to one of the fastest growing models in the country. So let us walk through it honestly: who it works for, what the numbers show, where practices get it wrong, and how to actually market a plan so it fills up instead of sitting on a shelf.

This is not a niche trend anymore

Start with direct primary care, the membership version of family medicine where patients pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to their doctor instead of running every visit through insurance. According to a 2026 report from Hint Health, drawn from more than 2,700 clinicians and 1.4 million members, this kind of membership grew 837 percent per capita between 2017 and 2025. There are now over 3,000 such practices operating in all 50 states. Researchers writing in Health Affairs documented the same surge in both concierge and direct primary care between 2018 and 2023.

The dental world tells a similar story for a different reason. Roughly 27 percent of US adults, about 72 million people, have no dental insurance, according to data highlighted by the American Dental Association and the CareQuest Institute. That is a massive group of people who pay cash for everything and have nothing softening the cost. In house dental membership plans exploded precisely to serve them: a flat yearly fee that covers cleanings and exams plus a standing discount on other work.

Med spas, men's health and TRT clinics, weight loss programs and aesthetics practices have landed in the same place from yet another direction. Their patients buy ongoing treatments anyway, so a monthly membership that bundles them just formalizes a relationship that already exists. Different specialties, same conclusion: patients will happily pay you directly and regularly when the value is clear.

What a membership plan actually is, and what it is not

People mix this up with financing all the time, so let us be precise. A payment plan or patient financing helps someone pay off one large treatment over time. A membership plan is something else entirely: an ongoing subscription, a recurring fee that buys a defined set of services, usually at a discount, for as long as the patient stays enrolled. Financing is about a single big purchase. Membership is about a relationship and a steady stream of monthly revenue.

In practice, plans tend to fall into a few shapes:

Preventive or in house plans

Common in dental and primary care. A flat yearly or monthly fee covers the routine, preventive visits, and members get a set discount on anything beyond that. It replaces insurance for the cash patient and gives them a reason to keep their checkups instead of waiting for something to hurt.

Direct primary care and concierge

A monthly fee, often somewhere between 50 and 150 dollars, buys unlimited or extended access to the doctor: same day visits, longer appointments, direct messaging, sometimes labs at cost. The practice sees fewer patients but knows exactly what it earns each month.

Treatment or service memberships

The med spa and aesthetics model. A monthly fee includes a recurring service, a facial, a wellness injection, a body treatment, plus member pricing on add ons. It smooths out the seasonality these practices usually fight and keeps people on a schedule.

You do not have to pick just one philosophy. Plenty of practices we work with run a membership for routine care and still offer financing for the occasional big case. The two solve different problems and pair well.

The retention angle most owners undercount

Here is the part that gets overlooked. A membership is not just a revenue tool. It is a retention machine. When someone has already paid for the year, they use the care. They book the cleaning, they come in for the follow up, they think of you first when something is wrong, because they are already invested. That behavior is gold, because keeping a patient has always been far cheaper than winning a new one. The often cited research from Bain & Company on customer loyalty found that lifting retention by just 5 percent can raise profits anywhere from 25 to 95 percent, depending on the business.

We have written before about why patient retention often decides whether a practice grows, and membership is one of the strongest retention tools there is. It turns a string of one off appointments into an ongoing relationship with a built in reason to return. It also chips away at a problem we see constantly, the practice that is too dependent on referrals and insurance to control its own income. A membership base is revenue you own, not revenue a payer or a referral source can take away.

Where practices get it wrong

The plans that fail almost never fail because the idea was bad. They fail for one of two reasons, and both are fixable.

The first is murky value. If a patient cannot tell in ten seconds why the membership beats just paying as they go, they will not join. The math has to be obvious and honest. A member should clearly come out ahead, and the fee should be simple enough to explain in one sentence. Three confusing tiers with fine print kill more plans than a high price ever does. Start with one clear option.

The second, and this is the one we fix most often, is that the plan is invisible. A practice sets up a perfectly good membership, then hides it. It lives on a laminated card at the front desk, mentioned only if a patient happens to ask about cost. Nobody can find it online. It is not on the website, not in the email list, not in a single ad. A membership you cannot discover and join is not really an offer. It is a secret.

How to actually market a membership plan

Treat the plan like the product it is. If you want people to join, they have to be able to find it, understand it, and sign up without friction. A few things that move the needle:

• Give it a real page on your website. Not a footnote. A clear page with what is included, the monthly price, and a button to join or book. Then link to it from your treatment pages and right next to your main booking button. This is exactly what a website built to convert is supposed to do: take a good offer and put it where people decide.
• Let people enroll online. If joining means calling during business hours and giving a card over the phone, you will lose the person who got excited at 9pm. Online signup with recurring billing turns interest into a member while the interest is still warm.
• Pitch it at the first visit. The best moment to offer a membership is right after a great appointment, when trust is highest. Train your front desk to mention it in plain words. This is also why your pricing should be upfront rather than hidden, because membership is easiest to sell to a patient who already trusts your numbers.
• Use the channels you already own. Your email list and your social media are perfect for reminding existing patients the plan exists. Most of your early members will come from people who already know you. A simple monthly email and a few honest posts explaining the value will do more than any cold ad.

There is one more piece that ties it together, and it is the phone. The patient curious about your membership often calls with a question or two before committing, frequently after hours. If that call hits a voicemail, the moment passes. A round the clock AI receptionist that can explain what the plan includes, answer the obvious questions, and get someone enrolled or booked means the person who was ready to join actually does, instead of drifting to whatever they find next.

Our honest opinion

We are not going to tell you every practice needs a membership plan. If you are a busy specialist living mostly on solid insurance contracts and a packed referral pipeline, a membership may add complexity you do not need. Be honest about your model first.

But if you serve patients who pay out of pocket, if insurance keeps squeezing your reimbursements, or if you feel the income swing every time the schedule dips, a membership plan is one of the smartest moves you can make. It gives you revenue you can predict, loyalty you can count on, and a real answer for the tens of millions of patients who have no coverage for what you do. The growth numbers are not a fad. They are patients telling you, with their wallets, that they would rather have a clear relationship with a provider they trust than keep gambling with a system they do not.

The catch is the one we keep coming back to. A membership plan only works if people can find it and join it. Build it well, price it honestly, and put it where patients actually look. The model is proven. The execution is where most practices leave the money behind.

A simple way to start

Pick one tier. Decide what it includes and a price where the member clearly wins. Write a plain one page explanation and put it on your website with an online way to join. Tell your existing patients it exists through one email and a couple of posts. Train the front desk to offer it after good visits. Give it ninety days and watch how many sign up. That is the whole pilot, and it costs almost nothing to try.

If you want the website, the email, the social and the phone all pulling patients toward the same easy yes, that is exactly the kind of patient acquisition system we build for healthcare practices across the US. We make your best offers easy to find and easy to say yes to, so the patients who already want a relationship with you actually start one.