A Pediatric Membership Practice Surveyed 43 of Its Own Parents on Whether It Calmed Them Down. 42 Said Yes.

Forty-two of 43 parents said concierge care lowered their anxiety. One said nothing changed. Nobody said it got worse.

That is the core finding of a study published October 3 in Cureus, and it comes from inside a single suburban pediatric membership practice, one whose offices include Boca Raton, Florida. The paper uses “concierge pediatric care” to cover both concierge and direct primary care models, so it lands squarely in the debate about whether pediatric DPC delivers what it promises to parents.

It’s a useful paper. It’s also a paper about one practice, written partly by one of its co-founders. Both of those things shape what you can take from it.

What the study did

The authors surveyed parents of babies aged 9 to 18 months who came in for well-child visits between October 2024 and March 2025. The 19-item paper questionnaire was handed out during the visit, after vitals, while the pediatrician stepped out to prepare growth charts. It was anonymous and voluntary. Forty-three parents took part.

The survey’s own questions name the practice: “How long have you been a member of VIPediatrics?” The last of the five authors, Chad Rudnick, is listed on the practice’s team page as co-founder and chief medical officer. The paper says the research team “was directly involved in the practice’s QI initiative, including designing the survey instrument.”

Nova Southeastern University’s review board classified the work as internal quality improvement rather than human-subjects research.

What parents reported

The anxiety numbers are lopsided.

• 35 parents, or 81.4%, said concierge care significantly lowered their stress. Seven more said it lowered it slightly.
• 33 parents, or 76.7%, chose “significantly reduced” when asked how their pediatrician affected their anxiety compared with what they had expected.
• 41 parents, or 95.3%, were extremely satisfied with pediatrician availability. The other two were moderately satisfied.

The practice’s access model is the likely driver, and the paper says so. In this practice, the authors write, a physician or nurse practitioner from the care team is available 24 hours a day, and there is no call-triage service. Calls usually go to the child’s own pediatrician or to a covering clinician inside the practice.

The internet findings run the other way. Of 42 parents who answered, 20 said online health information increased their anxiety. Only seven said it calmed them down.

Where the statistics get thin

Several of the paper’s headline p-values come from chi-square goodness-of-fit tests. Those tests check whether answers were spread evenly across the response options. When 42 of 43 parents pick “lowered,” the answers obviously aren’t even. A p-value under 0.001 confirms that and nothing more. It doesn’t compare these families to anyone else.

That’s the larger gap. The study has no comparison group. There are no parents from a conventional pediatric practice. The item the paper labels “baseline parental anxiety” asks how often parents felt anxious during the child’s first year, and 86% of the children were reported as “born into” the practice, so for most families that year likely falls inside the membership. The design can show these parents feel calm. It can’t show the membership made them calmer than they’d otherwise be. The authors acknowledge the cross-sectional design “precludes causal inferences.”

The one association test the paper highlights in its anxiety section deserves a closer look. The paper reports that satisfaction with availability was significantly linked to reduced anxiety, with p = 0.029. All 41 extremely satisfied parents reported less anxiety. Of the two moderately satisfied parents, one did and one didn’t. That significant result rests on a single parent.

The sample also skews. More than 90% of respondents held a college or graduate degree. The authors compare that with 58% of U.S. households with children under 18 in which at least one adult holds a bachelor’s degree. And 37 of the 43 children, or 86%, were reported as “born into” the practice.

The utilization claim

The abstract concludes that concierge care was associated with “more efficient healthcare utilization.” The body of the paper offers a self-report and an average.

Asked whether easy access changed how often they came into the office, 21 of 42 parents said they visited less. Thirteen said they visited more and eight noticed no change. The abstract describes this as “nearly half reporting fewer visits.”

Meanwhile, families logged an average of 21.1 pediatric encounters in the past year, in person and virtual combined. First-time parents had a median of 26, against 17 for experienced parents. The paper reports in-person and virtual encounters as one combined figure, and it doesn’t compare the total to any benchmark. Twenty-one encounters a year could be efficient. It could also be a lot of contact. The data here can’t tell you which.

It isn’t the first pediatric membership study in Cureus. In July, DPC Insider covered a 59-respondent telehealth survey of families in a multi-physician pediatric DPC network, published in 2025, in which families reported avoiding ER visits by texting or calling their doctor. That study had the same basic structure: a practice’s own members reporting their own behavior.

The counterargument

The strongest defense of this paper goes like this. A parent’s peace of mind is the thing a pediatric membership sells. Anxiety is subjective, so asking the parent is a valid way to measure it, maybe the only one. If 42 of 43 families say the 2 a.m. phone call changes how the first year feels, that is a real result about the product, comparison group or not.

That argument holds for the anxiety finding, as a description of what these families experience. If you might build a pediatric practice around direct access someday, it tells you parents notice that access and value it.

It doesn’t hold for the efficiency claim. “More efficient” needs a baseline, and this study has none. For pediatric DPC to make that case to employers and skeptical colleagues, someone will need to count visits, calls and ER trips across practices that didn’t design their own survey. Until then, this paper documents satisfied customers, and what their satisfaction saved is still unmeasured.