How Root Complements Primary Care

While Root does not need to sit alongside a DPC or on-site clinic solution, if you already have one of these in place, where does Root fit? 

First, let's lay out the difference between two models of care. 

These models are designed around access and acuity. Same-day appointments, episodic care, minor injuries, refills, screenings, triage, care navigation. The design goal is to remove friction between an employee and a clinician so that problems get handled early and locally.

When that works, the employer sees fewer avoidable ER and urgent care claims, less absenteeism, and faster return to work. 

An access model is built around throughput and proximity. A reversal model is built around depth and duration. Both are legitimate designs. They solve different problems, and they draw from different parts of your spend.

Your on-site or DPC arrangement works the acute side of the claims curve (typically about 5% of your overall spend). Root works the chronic side (up to 90% of your spend)— members driving specialty pharmacy, repeat specialist referrals, and downstream complications.

Because the outcomes depend on staying narrow.

A primary care panel carries enormous scope: acute illness, injury, preventive screening, behavioral health, referrals, refills, coordination, and chronic disease on top of all of it. A study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine put a number on that scope. Delivering guideline-recommended preventive, chronic, and acute care to a standard 2,500-patient panel would take a primary care physician 26.7 hours a day. Under a full team-based model, 9.3 hours. Chronic disease care alone accounts for 7.2 of those hours.

That gap gets resolved two ways: visits get shorter and follow-up intervals stretch. For a chronic condition considered stable, the shortest cadence in common use is one visit every three months. That interval works for maintaining a condition. It moves too slowly to reverse one.

By contrast, Root has multiple touch points every month between doctors and dietitians when working to reverse chronic disease. That cadence is part of what produced our Validation Institute savings validation for de-prescribing specialty medications in autoimmune conditions.

Run both models in one practice and one of them sets the operating rhythm. It is always the acute one. Same-day demand is urgent and visible; a member's nine-month medication taper is neither. Schedule templates, staffing ratios, clinician training, and the metrics a practice manages to all get built around whichever job is louder.

So every part of Root is built for a single job. Our physicians train in functional medicine and practice it all day. Visit lengths are set by what root-cause work actually takes. The care model assumes contact between visits. Outcomes get measured in biomarker improvement, decreased specialist utilization, and medication reduction over months. 

There is an employer-side version of the same answer. You are already buying primary care, through the health plan and then possibly again through your on-site clinic or DPC arrangement. The reversal layer is the one that is missing and Root fills that gap.

Your on-site clinic handles anything acute, episodic, or urgent — the sick visit, the injury, the routine primary care need. Root handles the other category: employees with a chronic condition, employees on multiple maintenance medications, and employees who are still symptomatic even though their condition is being managed.

By referral. Your on-site clinicians refer into Root the same way they'd refer to a cardiologist or endocrinologist.

By screening. Root offers the Root Cause panel — an advanced biometric screen — to your entire population, including employees who are remote or at sites without a clinic. That surfaces people who would benefit from this support but haven't been flagged by anyone yet.

On their own. Some of your employees are already seeking out functional medicine and paying cash for it. Those visits sit outside your plan, outside your data, and outside any clinical coordination with their existing care. Root gives them a credentialed option inside the benefit.

If you have an on-site clinic, a DPC arrangement, or a nurse-staffed clinic and you want to see how the two sit together in your specific claims picture, book a demo and we'll walk through it.