Skip to content
MarketScale
‹ Back to IndustriesHealthcare

Cutting Costs, Boosting Care: Why Employers Are Turning to Direct Primary Care for a Healthier, More Engaged Workforce

Rising healthcare costs continue to strain employers and employees alike — and with the average annual premium for family coverage nearing $27,000, benefits leaders are searching for new models that deliver both affordability and accessibility. At the same time, workplace well-being has expanded beyond basic coverage to include mental health, telemedicine, and preventive care,…

This story was produced through MarketScale. See how Healthcare teams put it to work with Executive Thought Leadership.

By Daniel Litwin · Direct Primary CareEmployee BenefitsHealthcare InnovationHr Strategy
Share

Key takeaways

01

Rising healthcare costs continue to strain employers and employees alike — and with the average annual premium for family coverage nearing $27,000, benefits leaders are searching for new models that deliver both affordability and accessibility.

02

At the same time, workplace well-being has expanded beyond basic coverage to include mental health, telemedicine, and preventive care,…

Get featured

Want to get featured in MarketScale Healthcare?

Create a free MarketScale workspace and get your company's expertise featured across our Healthcare coverage. No credit card, no demo required.

Start free

Rising healthcare costs continue to strain employers and employees alike — and with the average annual premium for family coverage nearing $27,000, benefits leaders are searching for new models that deliver both affordability and accessibility. At the same time, workplace well-being has expanded beyond basic coverage to include mental health, telemedicine, and preventive care, reflecting the broader cultural and technological shifts transforming healthcare delivery.

How can HR leaders make smarter, more human-centered decisions about benefits in this evolving healthcare landscape — and what does a truly “future-ready” benefits strategy look like?

HRSouthwest Conference 2025 recently brought together HR innovators and business leaders to explore the evolving landscape of employee well-being. At the event, Daniel Litwin, the Voice of B2B at MarketScale, caught up with Kyle Sheehan, VP of Strategic Growth at MaxHealth Direct Primary Care, to explore how direct primary care is helping companies balance cost control with genuine care access. Together, they explored how membership-based healthcare models are offering employers predictability, better utilization, and a renewed focus on employee wellness.

What you’ll learn…

  • Predictability Over Premiums: Direct primary care (DPC) provides a more stable cost model for employers, helping offset rising insurance premiums while improving access to care.
  • Access and Engagement: With 24/7 telemedicine and membership-based care, employees are more likely to use their benefits appropriately — reducing absenteeism and unnecessary ER visits.
  • Mental Health as a Core Benefit: Remote work and social disconnection have heightened the need for mental health support; employers are rethinking benefit structures to include accessible, stigma-free options.

Kyle Sheehan is a seasoned healthcare growth executive with over a decade of experience driving business development across imaging, mental health, and direct primary care sectors. He has led high-performing sales and marketing teams, built strategic provider partnerships, and expanded service offerings for companies such as MaxHealth DPC, Elevate Health Clinics, and Gateway Diagnostic Imaging. Known for his consultative sales acumen and adaptability across Texas and other markets, Sheehan specializes in scaling patient access solutions that merge fiscal responsibility with improved care delivery.

Article written by MarketScale.

Your experts belong here

Every story in MarketScale Healthcare starts with a company putting its clinicians, service-line leaders, and field engineers on the record. Buyers are already reading this topic. The only question is whose experts they find.

Service-line buyers vet vendors quietly, and your clinicians become the proof they find while doing it.

Get your team featuredSee how it works15 minutes, straight to a calendar.

About the author

Daniel Litwin
Daniel LitwinEditor, B2B Media, MarketScale

Daniel Litwin is a journalist of multiple disciplines focused on finding and telling engaging stories for B2B communities. He has interviewed executives from Fortune 500 companies including Honeywell, Microsoft, John Deere, and Chipotle, and leads editorial direction at MarketScale. Litwin hosts weekly shows and podcasts while helping develop new content approaches across the MarketScale platform. He holds a B.J. in Radio/Television Reporting/Anchoring and a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Follow Healthcare Insights

Get new expert content in your inbox.

Healthcare: are you visible to AI?

Before they reach out, Healthcare buyers ask AI engines which vendors to trust. Explore how your experts, customers, and partners can become useful content for buyers and AI search.

Free plan

You just read one Healthcare expert. Your company is full of them.

This article was produced through MarketScale. The same platform turns your clinicians, service-line leaders, and field engineers into the articles, video, and social content Healthcare buyers are searching for. Create a free workspace and see it with your own people. No credit card, no demo required.

NPS +73 · 1,000+ creators · 38+ countries

What you get, free

Your own MarketScale workspace, up to 10 people
One professional video edit a month for qualifying companies
Media requests to your crowd, remote recording, AI writing tools
$0, no credit card, nothing that expires

More Healthcare Insights

Value-based care reaches a quarter of revenue at 30% of surveyed health organizations

Value-based care reaches a quarter of revenue at 30% of surveyed health organizations

Wolters Kluwer Health argues value-based care software is judged on whether customers hit incentive thresholds and avoid penalties. A Fierce Healthcare-reported survey it cites puts value-based care at a quarter or more of revenue for 30% of organizations. The analysis is a vendor publication that ends by pitching its own UpToDate Connect API.

  • 01The sharper question for any population health or care coordination platform is whether it changes what a clinician does at the moment of decision, or only reports afterward what happened. Wolters Kluwer's reading of the evidence is that many platforms still struggle with the first.
  • 02Vendors selling into value-based contracts now face a build-or-license decision on clinical content, because Wolters Kluwer names current, trusted content, consistent clinician adoption across sites, and a traceable link from guidance to quality metrics as the three hard problems.

Sep 18, 2026

Hospitals lost money on telehealth with every payer type in 2025

Strata Decision Technology's Performance Trends report found telehealth encounters at U.S. hospitals rose 79% from January 2019 to January 2026, yet average total cost margins were negative for commercial, Medicare, Medicaid and self-pay patients in 2025. Adoption has outrun reimbursement. The gap lands on health systems that posted a 0.2% operating margin in April, according to Strata.

  • 01A negative total cost margin on telehealth across all four payer categories is now a national benchmark from a dataset covering more than 2,200 hospitals; a health system's own per-encounter virtual care margin can be measured against it.
  • 02Remote patient monitoring encounters grew nearly 4,000% since 2019 while reimbursement for the service is still maturing, so an RPM business case built on volume alone will miss the number that actually decides its viability.
  • 03The signal to watch is whether any single payer category shows a positive telehealth margin in Strata's next Performance Trends cut. As of the 2025 data, none did.

Sep 18, 2026

Most reprocessing audit gaps trace back to training, turnover and leadership

Most reprocessing audit gaps trace back to training, turnover and leadership

Joint Commission findings on its reprocessing standard point mostly to training, turnover, leadership and missing ownership, not sterilizers. CDC epidemiologists and a 2019 review add cleaning verification and manufacturer instructions as the steps to watch. Audit people and process steps as closely as the autoclave.

  • 01Of the Joint Commission's list of reasons hospitals miss reprocessing standard IC.02.02.01, at least eight concern people, priorities and management, so competency records and a named process owner belong in the audit as much as sterilizer logs.
  • 02A structured audit tool that scores compliance step by step, as a 2020 BMC Health Services Research study did across 189 reprocessing cycles, shows where training hours should go; the Nepal hospitals scored best on cleaning and storage and worse on the steps between.

Sep 14, 2026

Explore More Healthcare Insights

Read more expert perspectives from across Healthcare.

Browse Healthcare Hub

About the Expert

Daniel Litwin
Daniel Litwin

Editor, B2B Media

MarketScale

Daniel Litwin is a journalist of multiple disciplines focused on finding and telling engaging stories for B2B communities. He has interviewed executives from Fortune 500 companies including Honeywell, Microsoft, John Deere, and Chipotle, and leads editorial direction at MarketScale. Litwin hosts weekly shows and podcasts while helping develop new content approaches across the MarketScale platform. He holds a B.J. in Radio/Television Reporting/Anchoring and a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

For B2B teams

Your experts could be publishing here

Stories like this one run on content MarketScale captures from real practitioners. See how your team's expertise becomes coverage in Healthcare and beyond.

Book a 15-minute demo

Or call us. No forms required. We pick up. 214-945-2512