Hiring Announcement

Broad-scope family physician for Direct Primary Care practice

Richmond, Virginia

To start July 2023, will continue to interview until position is filled

Must be board-certified or on track to be board-certified in Family Medicine and eligible for licensing in Virginia

We welcome all levels of inquiry (informational, exploratory, and serious)

Dandelion Health, PLLC, is a new and growing direct primary care practice devoted to providing primary care that is accessible, dignified, and cost transparent. We seek to be innovative in our model and to build anti-oppressive and anti-racist systems of economic and social justice within our business and within the health care we provide. 

We provide preventive, urgent, and chronic disease care for individuals and families, from newborns to elders. 

Our goal is to be a comprehensive safe space for all people, especially those marginalized in society and by the traditional healthcare system. We strive to be patient-centered and apply trauma-informed practices, including a “health at every size” approach. We treat substance use disorders (buprenorphine and naltrexone), treat hepatitis C, offer HIV prevention, and provide sexual and reproductive health including abortion and gender affirming care.

Patients pay through a monthly membership that allows the practice to focus on high-quality patient relationships. We have an on-site pharmacy through which we sell common medications at-cost to patients. We do phlebotomy and collect other basic lab tests on site with at-cost lab pricing.

Currently, about half of Dandelion Health’s patients are uninsured, about 20% have high-deductible insurance plans, about 10% have Medicaid, and the remainder have private insurance. Over one-third of our patients are Spanish-only speaking. We are located in a historically Black neighborhood at 1312 Hull St, Richmond, VA. We use an interpreter phone line to provide care for speakers of other languages.

We are excited to hire one family physician who is eager to serve this community. This physician will be a core contributor to growing the practice. To date, we have committed to having all bilingual (English and Spanish) employees to ensure language accessibility to the monolingual Spanish-speaking patients. We are open to making exceptions to this if the candidate meets the community’s needs in other ways.

It is expected that all of Dandelion Health's physicians provide primary care for all ages. Please discuss with us if needing to strengthen certain skillsets. Besides caring for all ages, proficiency is not required in all of the areas of care listed above (substance use treatment, gender affirming care, etc) but we hope the incoming physician is willing to receive training in these areas or otherwise brings other complementary skillsets with them. There is no in-hospital care responsibility and no prenatal care. 

Dandelion Health is operated by its founders and family physicians, Joe Fields-Johnson, DO, and Shokoufeh Dianat, DO MAS. Joe has been the sole physician practicing at Dandelion Health for the last 2.5 years, and Shokoufeh will be joining in Spring 2023. 

All about the compensation, logistics, and benefits.
Compensation:
A newly employed physician will start with a guaranteed base annual salary of 77K and zero patients. With some guidance, you can choose how much work you would like in order to earn the salary you want. Your compensation will grow to your expected salary as your primary care panel grows. If the new employee helped Dandelion Health to develop separate service lines outside of the direct primary care services (for example, abortion and fertility care services that would be fee-for-service), this additional revenue would expedite their reaching their salary goal. See the end of this document for more details on pay potential and pay philosophy.

Logistics: Every patient is seen in-person to establish a relationship, and then we provide virtual and in-person care to them. Therefore, some of your clinical time will be remotely performed by phone or text. We will be sharing office space, so we will aim to stagger clinical hours (for example, 6 hour days with 2 hour overlap) and offer evening and weekend hours. Within certain parameters, the newly hired physician will have flexibility in determining their day-to-day schedule with sufficient clinical time weekly to meet the needs of their panel. 

There is an expectation that physicians stay on call for their patients, within reason, 24/7, except for PTO time. However, DPC doctors universally agree that this is not a burden, because they know their patients well, and patients tend to use the after-hours line judiciously because they trust that they will be able to access their physician with ease. Among our current patients, we receive an after-hours or weekend call approximately once every 2 weeks, and very rarely a middle-of-the-night call. 

We currently use Elation for our electronic medical record and Spruce for our HIPAA-compliant text-messaging with patients and staff. 

Benefits:

• $5,000 sign-on bonus for moving or relocation expenses

• 4 weeks PTO per year, includes CME. Practice physicians will cover for each other.

• Weekly clinical case reviews and peer learning with team

• Access to digital remote consultation with specialists (Thea Health)

• As a worker self-directed practice, you will have autonomy in how you schedule your patients and practice medicine.

• Health benefits: We currently offer monthly payment for a medical cost sharing plan (for example, Sedera). Additionally, we offer membership to other direct primary care and dental practices in the area. Employees will have worker’s compensation insurance coverage. We are a young organization, so we are budgeting and planning to expand these benefits in the future.

Other considerations: 

• We have educational debt ourselves and know this is a barrier to employment choices. Currently we are a for profit entity; however, we are actively working on transitioning to become a 501c3 and hope that this job will qualify for public service loan forgiveness (PSLF). Please ask for updates on this if you are interested, as the timeline is evolving.

• For those with educational debt who are not pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, some educational loans are eligible (by application process) for Virginia’s state loan repayment program. Dandelion Health is in a designated Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) with a HPSA score of 19. More here: https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/health-equity/virginia-loan-repayment-programs-2/

• We will help the new employee with marketing to build their patient panel, but the employee is expected to share this responsibility as well and be willing to put their face and name out in the community and on social media. 

• If interested in mentoring or teaching medical students, the new employee will have the opportunity to engage with our already-established relationship with the local medical school (Virginia Commonwealth University) and many surrounding schools and family medicine residency programs.

• For more information about the practice, feel free to explore our website www.dandelionhealth.com, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @dandeliondpc, and patient reviews on Google. 

More details on pay potential and pay philosophy

As we are headed in the direction of being a worker-self-directed non-profit (hopefully qualifying for PSLF), we believe in the autonomy of workers. To this end, all employees will have some role in the decision-making for the operations of the practice. For example, with transparent budgeting, the physician can make operations decisions to optimize their own team, based on their preferences: eg, decide to budget for a scribe or other support staff if this helps them see a larger panel, if seeing a larger panel and having a higher income is a priority for them. We want to be in conversation about income, work-life balance, and fulfillment in work. There are a range of options that a new employee at Dandelion Health could have. For example, Option 1: Physician works full time clinical (which we expect to be 32 hours clinical, 8 hours administrative) and earns a market-rate salary ($200K) once they have built their patient panel (based on our current growth, we expect their base salary of 77K would start to rise after 3 months in practice, then could take 12-24 months to reach market-rate goal salary, depending on many modifiable factors); Option 2: Physician wants to practice primary care and do creative projects (this would be fewer hours of clinical care at the worker’s decision, and can involve community engagement, research, teaching, or other)--this option would offer a lower salary ($100K+), but still qualify for full-time employment at a non-profit entity for PSLF). Our philosophy of a “worker self-directed job” stems from experiences in most clinical settings, where doctors are considered dispensable producers of revenue for the practice. We believe that relationships established with patients and coworkers make someone indispensable, and doctors can thrive in their clinical and professional work when given autonomy and the freedom of self-direction. 

In addition, we feel that front-line healthcare workers deserve a thriving wage and our intention is to maintain a fixed ratio between highest and lowest paid workers. This will allow our non-licensed colleagues to thrive in their work. This necessarily means that physicians’ salary raises will also require raising the salary floor of all employees. We feel this is consistent with our value of providing dignified care and work at Dandelion Health. This model will be co-developed with all workers and we look forward to your participation. 

Living in Richmond, VA

Richmond, VA, is a mid-sized capital city with a lot to offer. We would love to talk about your interests and help you realize yourself here in this beautiful and historically complex city. 

Here is how you apply.

• To apply or to inquire, please send a CV or LinkedIn profile to our email address: hiring@dandelionhealth.com

• We will begin to review applications and start interviews as soon as received, and continue until the position is filled.

• People of Color, people from poor and working class backgrounds, and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people are encouraged to apply.

• Initial interviews will be held by phone with all eligible candidates. You will receive an email with scheduling information. Secondary interview details will be discussed when applicable. 

COVID-19 considerations:
At this time, all patients are required to wear a mask. All employees are required to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and wear a mask per VDH guidelines.