What Concierge Medicine Actually Costs in Cincinnati, and What You're Paying For
What Concierge Medicine Actually Costs in Cincinnati
Pricing is hard to find on purpose. Here's how membership tiers, fees, and what they include actually break down.
Last updated: September 2026
If you have spent an evening comparing concierge practices and still cannot find a number, you are not doing it wrong. Pricing in this field is genuinely hard to pin down, and most practices will not publish it. This guide is written for the person doing that comparison right now: what a membership fee buys, what it does not replace, how the tiers differ, and what actually happens when you call at seven on a Tuesday night. Our practice has operated on a membership model in Greater Cincinnati since 2016, across three locations and ten clinicians, so the answers below come from running it, not from theorizing about it. September is Healthy Aging Month, and it also lands right before open enrollment, which makes it the natural moment to work out what next year's care is going to cost you.
Why Nobody Will Quote You a Price
There are three honest reasons the number is hard to find, and one less honest one.
The honest reasons: fees vary by individual physician rather than by practice, so a single posted number would be wrong for most providers. Fees also change periodically, and a stale figure on a website is worse than no figure. And what a membership covers is not standardized across practices, so two identical prices can buy very different things.
The less honest reason is that some practices treat opacity as a filter. If you have to call to get a price, you have already invested something, and you are easier to enroll.
We would rather you walk in knowing the ranges. Below is how the model works, stated as plainly as we can while still being accurate.
The Three Ways to Get Care at a Concierge Practice
The single most common misconception we hear is that concierge medicine is one thing with one price. In our practice there are three distinct access models, and the right one depends less on your income than on how complex your health picture is right now.
Physician-led concierge membership. An MD or DO with a deliberately small patient panel. This is the tier for someone managing multiple conditions, navigating perimenopause or menopause alongside cardiometabolic changes, coordinating specialists, or simply wanting the same physician for the next fifteen years. Nationally this tier is the most expensive one, and in our practice it currently runs in the low-to-mid thousands per year, varying by physician. New-member availability varies by provider and location, and two of our physicians are currently waitlist-only. See our concierge internal medicine membership page for how the tier is structured.
Direct Primary Care, led by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. A monthly membership rather than an annual fee, with a modest per-visit charge. Our DPC tiers are priced in tens of dollars per month rather than hundreds, which is the fact most people are surprised by. This tier suits someone who is generally well, wants unhurried access and real continuity, and does not need physician-level complexity management. It is worth knowing that our DPC panel has been at or near capacity at Mariemont, so this one comes with a waitlist conversation rather than an instant yes. Details are on the Direct Primary Care membership page.
Telehealth DPC and single-visit consultations. The lowest-commitment options. Telehealth DPC is a flat annual fee for virtual primary care. Separately, our women's telehealth consults and à la carte women's health visits are one-time, self-pay appointments with no membership attached, which is often the right first step for someone who wants a menopause evaluation without committing to a practice. Our concierge endocrinology memberships work similarly, with a consult option and two membership levels.
All figures above reflect current rates and are not a quote. Fees vary by provider and change periodically, so confirm the specific number with us before you make a decision.
What a Membership Actually Includes
This is the part that determines whether the fee is worth it, and it is the part that gets glossed over most often. A membership at our practice covers:
Direct access to your provider, around the clock. Not an answering service that pages whoever is on call. Your provider, by phone or message, including nights and weekends.
Same-day or next-day urgent and sick visits. Within twenty-four hours, as a standing commitment rather than a best effort.
Appointments long enough to finish the conversation. The national average wait for a new patient appointment across fifteen major metros reached 31 days in 2025, up from 26 days in 2022, and family medicine specifically averaged 23.5 days. Small panels are what make a different answer possible.
Unlimited healthcare navigation. Someone who knows your history calling the specialist's office, chasing the imaging result, and explaining what the report means.
Virtual visits when they are clinically appropriate, rather than as a substitute for being seen.
Continuity. The same provider, year over year, who remembers what your labs looked like before the change you are asking about.
If you want the longer argument for why time itself is the clinical variable, we made it in Why Women Need More Time With Their Doctor During Midlife and in Why Patients Are Leaving Traditional Primary Care for Concierge Medicine.
What a Membership Does Not Replace
We want to be very direct here, because this is where people get burned.
A concierge or DPC membership is not health insurance and does not function as insurance. You still need coverage for hospitalization, surgery, emergency care, imaging, most laboratory work, prescription medications, and specialist care. The membership pays for access to your primary care provider and the relationship around it. It does not pay for an MRI.
For most households the sensible way to think about it is a membership sitting alongside a high-deductible plan, not instead of a plan. That framing matters more than it used to. The average annual deductible for single coverage reached $1,886 in 2025, and at firms with 10 to 199 workers the average was $2,631, with 53 percent of covered workers at small firms facing deductibles of $2,000 or more. If you are already paying the first two or three thousand dollars of your care out of pocket, the arithmetic on a membership looks different than it does on paper.
What Happens When You Call at 7 p.m.
Here is the scenario, drawn from the kind of evening our providers handle regularly, with details changed.
A member in her early fifties develops a fever and flank pain on a Tuesday evening. In a traditional practice, that is an urgent care visit at minimum, possibly an emergency department, four hours, and a clinician who has never met her.
What happens instead: she messages her provider directly. Her provider, who already knows she had a urinary tract infection eighteen months ago and what she reacted to, calls her back within the hour, asks the questions that distinguish a bladder infection from a kidney infection, and decides with her whether this can be managed at home tonight with a morning visit or needs to be seen immediately. If it can wait until morning, she is seen at 8:30.
That is the product. Not a nicer waiting room. A clinician who knows you, reachable when the thing actually happens, with enough history in front of her to make a judgment call safely. Everything else in the membership exists to make that phone call possible.
What's Actually in Each Tier
Physician-led, direct primary care, or a single visit — the right one depends less on income than on how complex your health picture is right now. Here's how to tell which fits.
The Medicare Question, Answered Plainly
Our practice is non-participating with Medicare, and we cannot prescribe, order, or refer for Medicare HMO Advantage plans. We state that plainly because finding it out later is a genuinely bad experience.
What that means in practice is worth understanding on its own terms. Medicare does not cover concierge membership fees at any practice in the country. That is a national rule, not a practice policy. Separately, physicians can be participating, non-participating, or fully opted out of Medicare, and those three statuses affect billing differently. If you are on Medicare or approaching eligibility, ask any practice you are considering which of the three it is, and ask how your covered services will be billed. Ask us the same question. You should have the answer before you join anywhere.
Are You Locked Into a Contract?
The fear of being trapped comes up in nearly every discovery call, so here is how ours works. The physician-led concierge membership begins with a one-year commitment and is cancellable after six months with thirty days' written notice. Direct Primary Care is billed monthly. Single consultations carry no commitment at all.
Terms can change, so read the agreement you are actually handed rather than this paragraph. But the shape of it is worth knowing: there is an exit, and you do not have to be certain about the next decade to try the model for six months.
Using the Q4 Window to Plan for It
If you are reading this in September or October, you are in the one stretch of the year when you can actually restructure how you pay for care. Four things to work through, in order:
Look at what you spent this year, not what you budgeted. Add up the visits, the urgent care copays, the time off work, the two months you waited for an appointment. That is the real comparison number.
Check what your employer plan is doing for next year during open enrollment, particularly the deductible. If it is rising, the gap a membership fills is widening.
Ask about HSA and FSA eligibility. For 2026 the IRS has set HSA contribution limits at $4,400 for self-only coverage and $8,750 for family coverage. Separately, a change enacted in 2025 allows certain direct primary care arrangements to be treated as qualifying medical expenses beginning with plan years starting January 1, 2026, subject to monthly caps and specific eligibility rules. Whether a particular membership qualifies depends on how it is structured, so ask us and confirm with your own tax advisor rather than assuming.
Book the conversation before December. Panels fill on their own schedule, not yours, and the tier you want may have a waitlist.
Five Questions to Ask Any Practice Before You Join
Use these on us, and on everyone else you are considering. The answers will separate practices faster than the price will.
How many patients does this specific provider carry, and what is the practice's panel cap?
When I call after hours, who answers, and is it the person I see in the office?
What is your Medicare status, and how will my covered services be billed?
What is the minimum commitment, and what does cancellation require?
What is included in the fee, and what will still generate a separate bill?
If a practice will not answer the first two, that is information.
How to Find Out What This Would Cost You
The honest answer to "what does concierge medicine cost in Cincinnati" is that it depends on which tier fits you, which provider you see, and which of our three locations you can reach on a weekday morning. That is not evasion. It is why we do a discovery call instead of publishing a price list that would be wrong for most of the people reading it.
Come see where you would actually be going. Our Mariemont clinic on Miami Road, our Kenwood clinic on East Galbraith, and our Mason clinic on Mason Montgomery Road each carry a different mix of providers and tiers, and availability differs among them.
Call 513-760-5511 or start the membership conversation here. Ask us the five questions above. Bring the number you spent on care this year. We will tell you which tier fits, what it costs, and, if the answer is that none of them fit right now, we will tell you that too. That is what "medicine, not marketing" means in a pricing conversation.
