A Duluth Doctor Lost His Clinic to Fire a Week Before Opening. He Said His Schedule Wouldn't Change.
Dr. Jay Allen spent roughly six weeks renovating a space on East Fourth Street in Duluth. Painting, ceiling tiles, new flooring scheduled to go in on March 3. That was the day a fire started in the basement below him.
Nobody was hurt. Palisade Direct Primary Care was about a week from opening.
Allen’s first read of the room was narrow. “The damage up here is pretty much only smoke damage,” he told WDIO at the time, and he expected to be back in the same space after about two months of repairs. The smoke had already destroyed the practice’s brand-new medical equipment. The repair estimate did not hold either: the space was ultimately written off, and Allen started over somewhere else.
He opened on September 1 at 1118 East Superior Street, about six months later than the calendar he had been working from.
He had a plan that didn’t need the building
The line worth pulling out of the March coverage is short. Standing in a smoke-damaged room a week before an opening that was no longer happening, Allen said: “I can still provide that care just not here.”
So he went looking for a room. He arranged temporary space at Lakewalk Surgery Center, and he was flat about what that meant for the calendar: “I’ll still be able to see patients. Nothing has changed as far as my schedule goes.”
That is easy to skim past, and it should not be. Palisade sells monthly memberships, and the AAFP describes DPC practices as relying solely on patient fees, without payer contracts or government program participation. Revenue on that model attaches to a membership roster and a phone number, so finding another exam room was a logistics problem rather than a contracting one.
Aaron Johnson, a longtime patient, described the arrangement to Northern News Now in terms that have nothing to do with a building: “being able to text him and say, ‘hey Jay I need this thing can you get it for me?’ and it’s done.”
What the membership costs
Palisade charges $50 to $300 per month depending on family size, according to Northern News Now, with unlimited access to the doctor folded into the fee. Allen’s own framing of it: “If you come in five times a month, if you come in one time a month, you pay the same.”
The practice site lists same-day or next-day appointments, direct call, text, or email access to the physician, no copays, and wholesale pricing on labs and medications. Extra charges do exist, and the site says they are defined up front.
For context, the AAFP puts typical DPC membership fees at $50 to $100 a month, so the bottom of Palisade’s range sits at the floor of that band and the top reflects households rather than individuals. Pricing varies from one practice to the next.
The problem Allen keeps pointing at is one most patients would recognize on sight. “People are used to going to the doctor and getting a $400, $500, $600 bill,” he told Northern News Now.
The part Allen didn’t dress up
This is not a tidy comeback. Allen was direct with Fox 21 about what the fire actually did to him: “Financially, I did not benefit from the fire whatsoever. In fact, it set me back quite a bit.”
Six months of delay is a real hole for a new practice that lost its build-out and its equipment. He absorbed it, and he has been plain about that rather than selling the recovery. If you might be running your own startup numbers right now, that is the honest version of the risk column, and it came from someone who just lived it.
What opened on September 1
The new space has games and toys in the lobby, a record player, and juice boxes for the kids who come in. Allen built it to feel like a room you would sit down in rather than one you would wait in. Fox 21 describes the exam rooms as calm, with a hometown feel to them.
“I’m incredibly grateful to this city for being so so welcoming and so supportive in the middle of all of my struggles,” he told Fox 21.
He hopes to eventually add x-ray in house.