Meet Kyle Hampton | Direct Primary Care Physician and Co-Owner of Arktos Direct Care

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kyle Hampton and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kyle, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?

The thought process or idea that lead to our business came out of a desire to do things better and knowing that we could do it better.

I am a board certified family medicine physician and I left a secure well-paying employed position to open and run a membership based direct primary care clinic, called Arktos Direct Care.

Traditional insurance-based primary care is the standard that most patients and physicians know and understand. However, the system is severely flawed and both the patients and physicians suffer in that model. The way that the payment and reimbursement model works in traditional insurance practices requires rushed, impersonal care. Time is money. The more patients you can fit into the same allotment of time means more money can be billed out to the insurance company. What suffers is the quality of that care and being able to take the time to really understand what is going on in that patient’s life.

Patients suffer because they have to wait for a long time to get in to be seen, they are rushed at their office visit, they cannot get all of their questions answered or needs listened to or even addressed, and then they are shuffled along to the next specialist. No one ever really spends the time to get the root of the medical problem.

Physicians suffer because they are constantly asked to do more, see more patients, make more referrals, meet more metrics, work more hours. Physicians are overly-stressed, always running behind, feeling bad that they do not have the time to care for their patients adequately, and then taking their frustrations with the system out on the patients and their families.

It becomes a revolving door of never really getting to the root of any issue that creates these problems in primary care and then it just snowballs into burnt-out doctors and frustrated patients.
I was right in the middle of those problems and was ending my days feeling upset and frustrated that I could not be there for my patients the way I wanted to be able to care for them and then bringing that frustration home to my family life as well. I’ll admit it, I was burnt-out, as we like to say. But more it was really a moral injury due a situation that you just cannot fight against as the system is too big to stop it.

My wife, also a primary care physician and the co-owner of our business, and I knew there had to be a better way. But also a way to save ourselves and practice medicine the way we had always envisioned it. Really taking care of our patients in a personable and holistic way that was beneficial for both our patients and ourselves. That’s when we really started looking at direct primary care as an option.

Direct primary care or DPC is a membership based primary care that does not rely upon the insurance-reimbursement model at all. Our members pay us a monthly fee and we take care of their health the absolute best that we can. That’s it. No middleman, no health plans, no limitations on time or a cookie-cutter approach to healthcare. Just a simple personal relationship between physician and patient. Working toward a common goal of improving health and preventing disease.

So, in 2018, I jumped ship and started Arktos Direct Care from the ground up, from zero patients. Completely based on providing the best care for every member than I could. Keeping our patient panel small and having the ability to spend as much time as needed with our patients to get to the core problems that may be affecting their health. We grew the model and the business slowly, but steadily. Providing a type of care that most patients had never experienced, but that really resonated with them. Over the last four and a half years we have grown the business to where we are now, getting ready to open our second location and we will soon be adding more physicians to join us on this journey to provide better care.

The movement of DPC is not new, but it’s still relatively unknown for many people. We fully bought into the idea of DPC and started our business based on those ideals and feel we really have created a better type of primary care. Both for our patients and for ourselves as physicians. Back to how we always wanted to practice medicine.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I am the co-founder and co-owner of Arktos Direct Care. Arktos is a membership-based direct primary care (DPC) clinic. We do not take insurance. We are employed only by our own members. DPC is designed to provide personal care between a patient and physician. Without any insurance interference or roadblocks. We keep much smaller patient panels than traditional primary care and that allows us to offer much longer office visits for patients. We can often see patients on the same day if needed. We use secure apps to communicate and be available to our patients as much as possible or as needed. We really get to know our members and get a better understanding of what better health looks like for each and every one of our members. It becomes almost like having a doctor in the family.

Beyond that, we also work to keep costs as low as possible. We provide wholesale priced prescriptions, wholesale priced labs and dramatic discounts on imaging and diagnostic procedures. We do not charge for office visits, there are no co-pays or deductibles. In everything we do we are conscientious about cost and the prices for everything are discussed upfront. There are no surprise medical bills for our patients. Oftentimes we can save our members more than the cost of their monthly membership. We also provide osteopathic manipulation, regenerative medicine and aesthetic medicine services to members and non-members.

It essentially is like the Netflix of medicine. You can binge all you want and it won’t cost you anymore.

Essentially, we want everyone to know there is a better solution to the healthcare crisis in this country and there are a lot of doctors who have stepped outside the system to provide that better solution. We are just one of these clinics but we tend to think that we do DPC very well and you won’t be disappointed by trying out Arktos Direct Care.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Well, living in Fort Collins, it’s all about the outdoors and being on the footsteps of the Rockies. Around our area, I love to spend time in Horsetooth Mountain Open Space or in the many state parks we have close by. I can usually be found mountain biking with friends or hiking with my family. When the outdoor activities end I do love to experience the wealth of breweries that Fort Collins is known for. I also enjoy spending dinners with friends around Old Town and taking in all the beauty that downtown Fort Collins has to offer. When it’s more relaxed and we are just staying home we can usually be found in the neighborhood cul-de-sac with kids riding bikes, having water balloon fights or nerf battles, or just hanging out with neighbor friends.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
The whole direct primary care movement and the pioneers of DPC who risked moving away from the established medical system to try and provide better care for their patients. DPC has been growing for over 10 years and was started from frustrations and limitations that primary care physicians have been feeling for decades. Rushed, impersonal, low quality healthcare that was leading to poor patient outcomes and then to burnt-out, tired physicians. The leaders and disruptors who stepped away from well-paying corporate medicine employed positions to try something that no one had done before in the hopes they could provide better healthcare to patients are the ones who really deserve credit for where myself and my business are today. Without the help of the whole DPC community, this type of practice and business would not be possible.

Website: www.arktosdirectcare.com

Instagram: arktosdirectcare

Linkedin: Kyle Hampton, DO

Facebook: www.facebook.com/arktos.directcare.3