Scaling Direct Primary Care:
How SALTA Broadened Its Reach With the
Ameriflex HRA + DPC Program
Healthcare networks and hospitals face a major challenge when scaling Direct Primary Care (DPC): convincing corporate employers to add a subscription-based model to their traditional benefits packages. The solution lies in pairing specialized financing with clinical care. By leveraging the HRA + DPC framework, healthcare systems can connect with more businesses, providing high-quality care without administrative friction.
A prime example of this success is how SALTA expanded its network and simplified corporate benefit delivery by partnering with Ameriflex.
Why Are Healthcare Networks Growing with Direct Primary Care?
Benefits of Direct Primary Care for Health Providers
Direct Primary Care allows healthcare providers to rebuild the patient-practitioner relationship from the ground up. By moving away from the traditional fee-for-service insurance reimbursement model, networks charge a flat monthly membership fee covering a defined set of medical services. This model eliminates surprise billing and provides patients with 24/7 direct access to their doctors.
SALTA has excelled with this model, fostering impactful relationships with its members. By adopting a DPC model, they have achieved exceptional healthcare outcomes while enhancing the patient experience.
What Is a Health Reimbursement Arrangement and How Does It Help?
A Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) is an employer-funded, tax-free account used to reimburse employees for eligible medical expenses. The employer retains complete customization over the plan. They decide exactly how much money to contribute and designate which specific expenses are eligible for reimbursement.
Because there is no IRS maximum allowance, businesses can tailor the HRA to their precise financial needs, making it an incredibly cost-effective benefit option. Employees can then use these tax-free funds to pay for their care, and unused funds can even roll over year to year if the employer enables it.
How Does the Ameriflex and SALTA Partnership Work?
Joined together by Accresa’s software platform, the partnership between Ameriflex and SALTA makes it easy for employers to fund subscription care. Employers set their own fixed contribution amounts, eliminating fluctuating healthcare cost concerns. The fixed monthly DPC membership fee qualifies as an eligible expense that can be paid for using pre-tax dollars directly from the Ameriflex HRA. This gives them better control over insurance premiums and claim costs while still offering highly competitive, high-quality benefits. This creates a win-win for employers and their employees. Employees are empowered to be more proactive with their health, taking nothing away from the employer’s bottom line.
How Complicated is Ameriflex’s HRA + SALTA’s DPC Program to Manage?
The program enlists Accresa to establish an accessible, highly regulated bridge between corporate employees and medical providers, making it easier to manage. SALTA directly integrates with Ameriflex on the Accresa platform. The platform then handles the administrative and financial heavy lifting on the back end, freeing human resource teams from dealing with complex, multi-layered benefits administration.
SALTA integrates with Amerflex via the Accresa platform. The platform handles the administrative and financial heavy lifting on the back end.
The workflow simplifies day-to-day operations in several ways:
Automated Eligibility Management: An Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) feed setup automatically syncs and simplifies eligibility tracking for all participants.
Back-End Reconciliation: The eligibility management and payment reconciliation take place entirely between Ameriflex and SALTA on the Accresa platform. Employers avoid dealing with disjointed monthly invoices.
Strict IRS Compliance: The HRA payment maintains an exact audit trail of purchases to fulfill the IRS’ substantiation requirements. Accresa’s system sets this up as a group funding mechanism, meaning administrators do not need to issue individual participant cards.
Robust Security Protocols: Ameriflex is SOC 2 certified, ensuring that participant security and data privacy remain a top priority.
What Are the Results of the HRA + DPC Program?
According to a five year study, SALTA’s program stabilizes healthcare costs and delivers significant employer savings, all while drastically reducing high-cost medical utilization. By combining DPC with HRA financing, their model contains annual growth trends and improves patient health outcomes.
Results from the multi-year tracking and health data show the clear benefits of the program:
Substantial Financial Savings: Employers kept their yearly cost growth at just 0.9% compared to the expected 6.2% trend in similar groups. This limits claims costs by $5.89M and yields $3.21 in net savings in the fifth year alone. Cumulatively, this comes out to $13.84M over five years, giving a 2.2X return on investment.
Reduced Emergency and Hospital Care: The program cuts emergency room visits by 31% and drops hospital stays by 71%. This saves $2.9M per 1,000 lives each year.
Fewer Return Trips: In addition to reducing total emergency room visits, SALTA clinic users have a 23% emergency room return rate as compared to 42% for traditional groups.
Better Ongoing Disease Management: Members who use the clinics have a 25% lower hospital stay rate than non-users, even though SALTA patients carry a 40% higher load of long term illness.
How Accresa Further Simplifies HRA + DPC Programs
Accresa supports this collaborative ecosystem by serving as the underlying platform where staff can easily view patient info, coordinate care plans, and streamline employer enrollment. This combined infrastructure allows SALTA's corporate clients to easily choose their provider, location, and pricing structure while keeping administrative overhead completely hand-off for the medical team.
Accresa powers eligibility management, DPC enrollment, and payment allocation across the SALTA ecosystem. The platform enables employees to seamlessly enroll in a customized network of SALTA providers and affiliate providers based on their employer’s offerings and healthcare needs.
Through Accresa, SALTA has been able to build tailored provider networks, designate locations, and streamline enrollment while simplifying patient information management for staff. This ensures a consistent, scalable experience without placing administrative burdens on corporate clients.
Paired with Ameriflex’s HRA infrastructure, the system delivers an end-to-end solution for SALTA’s clients. Employees easily select providers, enroll in DPC plans, and manage benefits while payments and HRA contributions are automated behind the scenes.
The result is a highly configurable, low-touch administrative model. SALTA manages care, Accresa handles workflows and payments, and Ameriflex supports HRA administration—delivering a seamless, flexible benefit.
Schedule a Demo to Scale Your Healthcare Network
Managing the complex tasks of multi-region billing, enrollment tracking, and continuous fund allocation requires a flexible, specialized platform. Accresa holds a patent for many-to-many payments software designed to automate these exact workflows for hospitals and healthcare systems.
If your healthcare network is ready to eliminate administrative waste, broaden its corporate employer reach, and scale its DPC footprint effortlessly, we’re here to help. Schedule a demo today today to see our platform in action.
