Northeast Missouri Had No DPC Clinics When Healthspan Opened in La Belle in 2024, Co-Founder Scoggin Said. It Just Added a Second Location in Canton.

Practice Spotlight by DPC Insider — Practice Desk
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Sources: New clinic to bring health care to Northeast Missouri for flat monthly fee | WGEM · Healthspan expanding direct primary care to Canton, Missouri | KTTC · Lewis County Scoop Business Spotlight – Healthspan DPC · Healthspan DPC – Affordable & Accessible Primary Care · Canton Location Opening Soon – Healthspan Direct Primary Care · Healthspan DPC second Canton location opening | Facebook

Getting a primary care appointment in rural northeast Missouri has never been a quick errand. Lewis County sits in northeastern Missouri, well away from the clinic networks clustered around the bigger metros.

Aaron Neisen, DO and Matt Scoggin, FNP changed that when they opened Healthspan DPC in La Belle. WGEM reported that August that the clinic was set to open on September 3, with an open house five days later. Scoggin told the station there were 2,500 DPC clinics in the country at that point, and none of them had reached this region. Healthspan, he said, would be the first.

KTTC reported in July that Healthspan was expanding to a second location in Canton, also in Lewis County, with the new clinic due to open in early September. The Canton location is now open and welcoming patients.

The Economics Behind the Expansion

Healthspan runs on a flat monthly membership fee. Patients pay for access to their provider, not for each individual visit. The practice doesn’t bill insurance for primary care services rendered in the membership.

When Healthspan launched in La Belle, WGEM reported the individual membership at $80 a month and $200 a month for a family. WGEM listed what the fee covered: virtually unlimited office visits with a nurse practitioner, chronic disease management, in-office procedures, discounted labs and wholesale medications, plus direct access to the provider by text, email or call. The practice currently lists three tiers: $80 a month for an individual, $150 for an individual plus one, and $200 for a family. The Lewis County Scoop reported in April 2026 that members get same-day or next-day appointments in most cases. Membership rates vary by practice and by location, and they change.

The absence of insurance billing is worth dwelling on in the rural context. Fee-for-service primary care depends on volume. A clinic needs enough insured patients moving through it to cover overhead, which creates pressure on scheduling, on which services get offered, and on which communities a new practice can afford to open in. A DPC practice running on membership revenue has a different cost structure. A practice running on membership revenue, without insurance billing overhead, can operate in a small town in ways that a traditional fee-for-service clinic cannot.

That doesn’t mean DPC works everywhere without conditions. A monthly membership still requires patients who can pay it. Rural counties with high uninsured rates or constrained household incomes face real limits on what the math can support. But the structural overhead is lower, and a practice without a billing department is cheaper to run than one with.

The Team at Two Sites

Matt Scoggin is a family nurse practitioner. Aaron Neisen is a doctor of osteopathic medicine. WGEM called them the clinic’s founding nurse practitioner and founding physician. Scoggin explained the membership model to WGEM, and the practice’s model appears built around direct provider access rather than around a large clinical staff.

Running two locations raises real operational questions at a practice this size. Whether the patient panel at each site is large enough to carry its share of the costs, and how provider time is organized across both, is one of the practical tests the Canton opening sets in motion.

The Lewis County Scoop’s business spotlight in April 2026 gives some background on how the two describe the practice. Neisen told the Scoop that first visits typically run 60 to 90 minutes, and both providers said they work directly with vendors to hold down what members pay for labs and medications.

What To Watch

The La Belle location is two years old. The Canton clinic has since opened.

A few signals are worth tracking in the next six to twelve months. The first is panel growth in Canton: whether the new location fills enough memberships to carry its share of the practice’s costs. A rural DPC clinic tends to find its floor quickly: there are only so many households in the surrounding area who know about the model and can pay for it. If the Canton panel fills and stabilizes, the two-location structure works. If it doesn’t, the practice faces a decision about whether to close the second site or subsidize it from La Belle’s base.

The second signal is geographic. If Healthspan reaches a stable two-location practice and reports it, the evidence that this model works in Lewis County gets harder to argue against for whoever tries the next one. Rural DPC skeptics (and there are legitimate ones, focused on the monthly fee as a barrier for the patients most likely to go without care) point to access as the central problem. A practice that stays open is a partial answer. A practice that expands is a different kind of answer.

Whether the Canton opening leads to a third location, or a steadier version of the first two, is a question 2027 will start to answer.