Most onsite-clinic case studies brag about a launch. This one’s about what happens after the launch — the part that actually decides whether a clinic saves money: do people keep coming back?
For this self-funded manufacturer, six months in, the answer is yes. The clinic isn’t being tried. It’s being relied on.
Why return rate is the number that matters
A one-time visit is curiosity. A second visit is trust — and trust is what turns an onsite clinic from a nice perk into a cost-bending tool. When employees route their real care through the clinic instead of the ER, urgent care, and fragmented out-of-network visits, the plan stops absorbing those claims. That only happens if people come back.
Here, 31% of the employees who’ve used the clinic have already returned — a high early return rate that says the care is good enough to become someone’s actual front door, not a one-off.
What six months looks like at full stride
- 59 employees seen across 101 encounters, with the clinic active every weekday — not a once-a-month pop-up, but a steady part of how this workforce gets care.
- $35,000 of primary care delivered at PCP-equivalent pricing — $0 of it hit the health plan. Priced as urgent-care visits, the same care would have run about $41,000.
- $598 of care value delivered per member — real medicine, not check-the-box screenings.
- Much of the volume is acute, occupational, and musculoskeletal care — exactly the visits that otherwise default to the ER at many times the cost.
Every figure is the actual care delivered, valued at what the plan would have paid, reconciled against what it actually paid — nothing.
The part that compounds
The clinic also caught 17 chronic conditions across 44 member-condition flags — high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, metabolic risk — and brought them under management before they turn into the heart attacks and six-figure claims that wreck a self-funded plan. Managed now, that’s roughly $1.1 million in 10-year exposure under control.
High adoption plus early chronic-condition capture is the combination that bends a plan’s cost curve for years, not just one renewal.
How we know it’s real
Every number here is calculated from this employer’s own encounters and clinical data — not estimated from a book of business — and reconciled against actual claims. Through Archer Strata, the employer and their broker watch it build in near real time instead of waiting for a quarterly deck. The methodology 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.