What to Ask Before You Join a Concierge Practice in Greenwich
Oct 12, 2026
If you're researching concierge medicine in Greenwich right now, you've probably already read three or four practice websites, and they all say some version of the same thing. More access. More time. A doctor who knows you. What none of them tell you is what to ask before you sign anything, because the real differences between practices live in the details nobody puts on a homepage.
I get asked a version of the same question nearly every week, usually by someone who has already done their homework and still feels like they're missing something. "We can afford it," they tell me, "but how do we know it's worth it." That's the right question, and it deserves a real answer instead of a sales pitch.
Most of the people who call Nadia, our Membership Director, to set up a first conversation describe the same handful of experiences. They feel like a number at their current doctor's office. They've been rushed in and rushed out of appointments that were supposed to address a real concern. Or they're looking for someone to advocate for them, not just see them once a year and move on to the next name on the schedule. If any of that sounds familiar, you're not evaluating concierge medicine in the abstract. You're trying to solve a specific problem, and the questions below are built to get you a specific answer.
After almost fifteen years building concierge and family medicine practices, first in Palo Alto and now here in Greenwich, I've seen this model from every angle, as the physician building it and, for several years, as the Chief Medical Officer overseeing outpatient care at scale for one of the largest clinic organizations on the East Coast. I've watched this model get run well and I've watched the fee structure get treated like a blank check. So before you commit to any concierge practice in town, here are the five questions I'd want answered if I were the one evaluating it.
Every concierge practice will tell you their panel is small. Ask for the number. A membership fee buys you time, and time only exists if the panel size protects it. I keep my patient panel at Mercer Medical intentionally limited, because the moment it grows past what one physician can know deeply, the whole model collapses back into the same rushed, ten-minute visits you joined to escape. The real test isn't whether a practice says "small panel." It's whether they'll tell you the actual number, and whether that number still leaves room for your first appointment to run 90 to 120 minutes, the way mine does, with a full history, a physical exam, a personalized lab panel, and enough time to talk through what's going on in your life and not just what's on your chart.
This is the question people are often most afraid to ask, because the honest answer at most practices is some version of "a call center will get back to you." Ask what 24/7 access means at the hour you'd need it most. At Mercer, if something comes up before 7pm, you call me directly. After 7pm, that same line is reserved for true medical emergencies, and anything non-urgent gets addressed by 9am the next morning. That's not unlimited availability dressed up to sound impressive. It's a real boundary, stated upfront, so you know exactly what you're buying before you need it at the worst possible moment.
Ask what happens if you end up in the hospital, or need a specialist fast. This is the scenario nobody thinks about until they're living it, usually with an aging parent or a diagnosis that came out of nowhere. At Mercer, I stay engaged with your inpatient team if you're admitted anywhere, and I maintain real working relationships with specialists in cardiology, rheumatology, and allergy, among others, so a referral isn't a cold handoff into a six month waitlist. When outside records, labs, or imaging come in from another provider, I review them myself and go over what they mean with you directly, not through a portal message with no context attached. None of this guarantees a specific specialist's calendar will open faster. What it does mean is you have someone whose job is to make the calls and ask the questions on your behalf, instead of leaving you to manage a fragmented system alone while you're already scared.
Hidden costs are the most common complaint I hear about other concierge models, and it's almost always the same pattern. The membership fee sounds like it covers everything, and then invoices start arriving for things you assumed were included. Ask for the actual list. At Mercer, membership includes your annual wellness exam, up to 15 extended in-person visits a year, two house calls, GLP-1 and metabolic management, specialist coordination, and care coordination if you're ever hospitalized. Labs, imaging, specialist fees, medications, and vaccines are billed separately, and you're told about any of those costs before they happen. No invoice should ever surprise you. If a practice can't give you a clean answer to what's included and what isn't, that's your answer.
This is where I'd push hardest if I were sitting across from a doctor instead of behind the desk. Ask directly what happens if you want to cancel, move, or simply decide the fit isn't right. You deserve a straight answer, not a redirect to the fine print. I don't believe in locking a patient into a relationship that isn't working for them, and I don't use auto-renewal terms to make that decision harder than it needs to be. A membership built on genuine trust doesn't need a contract to hold someone in place. If a practice gets vague or defensive when you ask this question, pay attention to that.
Fairfield County has more concierge options per capita than most of the country, which should be good news for patients, and mostly it is. But it also means the burden falls on you to tell the difference between a practice built around genuine access and one built around the appearance of it. The families I see most often started this search after losing a doctor to retirement or a group buyout, after a scary diagnosis made them realize nobody was quarterbacking their care, or after one too many visits where they felt like they were being processed instead of known. Whatever brought you here, you're allowed to ask hard questions before you commit, and a practice worth joining will welcome them rather than rush you past them.
I built Mercer Medical around a simple idea. Patients need time, and the traditional model is structurally built to deny it to them. Everything else, the panel size, the after-hours line, the specialist relationships, the way billing works, the way I treat whole families as one connected picture so nothing falls through the cracks, exists to protect that time. If you're evaluating practices right now, ask these five questions of every one of them, including mine. The answers will tell you more than any website can, and they'll tell you faster than a glossy brochure ever could.
If you'd like to ask me these questions yourself, Nadia, our Membership Director, can set up a no-pressure meet and greet so you hear the answers directly before you decide anything.