A health care provider in Lexington is flipping the script on how patients receive care by using a subscription model to offer lower prices and more immediate, personalized service while eliminating health insurance from the equation.
Journey Health was launched in 2023 by physician assistants Andy Williford and Ryan Miller and nurse practitioner Nicole Perkins to bring a more holistic and preventive approach to health care. Williford and Miller previously founded Access Med, which operated on the same subscription model Journey uses today. They partnered with Perkins upon Access Med’s merger and rebranded as Wild Health in 2019. When COVID-19 hit and Wild Health pivoted to testing, vaccinations and other telehealth services, the trio decided to move in a different direction.
From left, physician assistant Ryan Miller, nurse practitioner Nicole Perkins, and physician assistant Andy Williford launched Journey Health in 2023.
“When I got partnered up with [Andy and Ryan] is when I found this beautiful world of health care where you didn’t have to deal with insurance,” Perkins said. “Once you get a taste of that and see what all you can do to actually help your patients, you don’t want to go back to the traditional model where you’re rushing to see a different patient every five or ten minutes.
“We all come from an ER background, so we’ve seen the worst of the worst in the hospital setting as well, from people who can’t control their chronic diseases to comorbidities. With that in mind, we started Journey Health to offer a more holistic, wellness- and preventive-focused version of health care in the hopes of keeping symptoms from escalating and helping patients avoid the stress and cost associated with a trip to the ER, or worse.”
Journey Health currently has about 400 paying monthly members, ranging from newborns to octogenarians. Billing is set by age brackets — $60 per month for ages 19–45; $80 for ages 46–65; $100 for ages 66 and older; and $30 for children up to age 18 (with a paying adult membership).
Memberships include unlimited office visits with no copays and full access to Journey Health’s resources, including in-clinic procedures such as EKGs and stitch removal, lab work, wholesale prescription refills (averaging 20–30% less than retail prices), weight-loss programs and more. According to Perkins, the Journey Health team also offers extensive coaching and lifestyle consultation.
“In a traditional model, you get labeled by your age and race and get put into a box, but here we look at things in the complete opposite way,” Miller said. “We treat each patient individually, meaning we can do as little or as much as you want to do, all the way up to genetics. In addition to getting a picture of a patient’s health history on their first visit, we’re also focused on what their goals are and what we can do to help achieve them.”
Perkins added that this level of personalized care results in most patient visits lasting up to two hours, as the team not only learns about what brought patients in initially, but also gets to know their broader needs and health goals. While Journey Health shares some characteristics with concierge medicine, Perkins emphasized that it is not a traditional concierge model, but rather private, personalized primary care designed to be more affordable, particularly when paired with a high-deductible insurance plan.
“A lot of traditional health care right now is very reactive,” Perkins said. “They wait until you develop diabetes before they're going to address it for you, whereas here we look at a lot of the markers previous to that, like ‘Are you starting to be prediabetic?’ and ‘Do you have elevated glucose and insulin?’ Because of that, we're able to be a lot more proactive and stop disease before it happens instead of trying to reverse the damage once it's already there.”
At the moment, Journey Health has one clinic, located at 3094 Harrodsburg Road, but Perkins and Miller say future goals include expansion into other parts of Lexington and nearby towns, upgrading its electronic health record system, and adding cosmetic services such as hair removal. They are also exploring partnerships with government jurisdictions and state agencies to provide primary care for employees, furthering the company’s mission of making health care more affordable and accessible.