The big national onsite vendors wouldn’t have quoted this company at all — too small, too spread out, not enough lives to staff a full-time clinic. So the question was never “which onsite vendor?” It was “is onsite even possible for us?”
The answer, six months in: not only possible — already working, on a clinic that’s open part-time.
The setup
A regional trucking and logistics employer with a blue-collar workforce — the kind of population where the emergency room and urgent care quietly become the default front door, and every one of those visits hits a self-funded plan at full price. A full-time onsite clinic was never on the table at their size. A shared, part-time Archer clinic was.
It opened light: nine clinic days across the first six months — roughly a day and a half a month. That’s the entire point of the model. You don’t need a clinic staffed five days a week to move the numbers; you need it sized to the population.
What happened in nine days
- 29 employees seen, across 35 encounters — 58 billable services delivered.
- $7,376 of primary care delivered at PCP-equivalent pricing — and $0 of it hit the health plan. That’s care that would otherwise have arrived as claims, often through far more expensive doors.
- 10 encounters were ER-eligible — acute, occupational, or musculoskeletal complaints that, without a clinic on site, routinely route to the emergency room or urgent care. Priced as urgent-care visits, that same care would have run $8,780.
- On the side, 3 labs run through LabCorp saved $163 versus commercial in-network rates, and 25 therapy sessions through BetterHelp (4 employees actively in care) saved $2,750.
These aren’t projections. Every figure is the actual care delivered, valued at the price the plan would have paid — reconciled against what the plan actually paid, which was nothing.
The number that matters: $0
A self-funded employer pays its own claims. Every visit that happens at the onsite clinic instead of an ER or an out-of-network urgent care is a claim the plan never has to absorb. Six months in, $7,376 of care moved off the plan’s books entirely — on a clinic open nine days. The model compounds with every clinic day added.
Catching what gets expensive later
The bigger story isn’t the six-month number — it’s what got caught. The clinic identified 9 chronic conditions across 37 member-condition flags — things like high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, and metabolic risk that, left unmanaged, become heart attacks, dialysis, and six-figure claims years down the line.
Archer prices that forward: managing those conditions now represents roughly $1.2 million in 10-year exposure brought under active management. That’s the difference between a clinic that treats sniffles and one that bends a self-funded plan’s long-term cost curve.
How we know it’s real
Most vendors hand an employer an estimated savings number, modeled from someone else’s book of business. Every figure here is calculated from this employer’s own encounters and clinical data — visit by visit, condition by condition — and the plan-impact line is reconciled against actual claims.
And it’s visible as it happens. Through Archer Strata, the employer and their broker watch this build in near real time instead of waiting for a quarterly deck. The full methodology — how every dollar is traced to a service, not a model — is in the cost-redirection guide.
Calculated from employer encounter and clinical data; published anonymized. If you run benefits for a 100-to-1,000-employee company and want this modeled against your actual claims, start here.