In this episode Ron talks to Dr. Alex Lickerman. Alex is the Founder, CEO, and a Direct Primary Care Physician at ImagineMD. Here he discusses why he left the large group model to be an independent physician and pioneer in direct primary care. He dives into the benefits of the direct primary care model and how it is not just concierge medicine for the rich. DPC providers are much less prone to burnout and it is an attractive model to encourage more medical students to go into primary care. Here Alex presents his argument for direct primary care as the primary care model of the future.

Alex spent the first 20 years of his career as a leader at one of the top academic medical centers in the world, the University of Chicago, where he ran primary care for seven years and taught generations of today’s leaders in medicine. There he enjoyed a reputation as “a doctor’s doctor,” caring for many physicians who are themselves today considered leaders in their fields. He is a master clinician, routinely diagnosing medical problems that leave other doctors puzzled.

A nationally recognized speaker on the topic of resilience, his book, The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self, details evidence-based steps one can take to increase resilience and formed the basis of the landmark Resilience Project, which he began while at the University of Chicago and exported to ImagineMD as the Undefeated Minds program. His second book, The Ten Worlds: The New Psychology of Happiness, details an entirely new psychological paradigm that explains how it’s possible to achieve a kind of happiness that can’t be destroyed by anything. Living by medicine’s most famous aphorism, “The secret of the care of the patient lies in caring for the patient,” he counts his tenacity in designing preventive care interventions, managing acute and chronic disease, and making the right diagnoses as his greatest strengths. [...]