By Jennifer Christian
Wayland Post Contributor
Two female primary care physicians have recently joined existing “concierge” medical practices in Wayland — and are taking new patients. Both Dr. Kim Buckman (now with MDVIP on Boston Post Road) and Dr. Jane Yu (now with Wayland Personal Physicians in Wayland Town Center) are experienced clinicians, each having spent more than 20 years in outpatient clinical practice — and new to concierge medicine.
Concierge medicine is a new and increasingly popular healthcare delivery model for primary care in which patients pay a fixed annual membership fee to join a particular physician’s practice. The annual membership fee supplements the concierge physician’s income, allowing them to reduce the number of total patients in their practice and giving them the freedom to deliver more individualized care. All of this is intended to restore the physician’s passion for the profession of medicine while enabling them to continue to make a fair living.
In this setting, patients receive unusually thorough annual evaluations with special testing along with personalized care and easier access and convenience the rest of the year. Patients (and/or their insurers) continue to pay for illness visits, routine follow-ups and related tests.
Both Yu and Buckman were previously affiliated with “safety net” hospitals and outpatient practices treating many low- and moderate-income patients. Roughly half of American physicians today are struggling with burnout, especially primary care clinicians who are in the lowest tier for income.
“Before I learned about concierge medicine, I had been exploring other options for how to use my medical degree,” said Buckman. “But I didn’t want to give up on patient care.”
At her prior practice, she said she had to see a different patient every 15 minutes. She was “fighting fires and couldn’t make changes in patients’ lives to keep them healthy. I was practicing reactive medicine only, with no time to talk about anything else. If I did, the next patient became upset.”
“I always felt rushed, and neither the patients nor I liked it or felt satisfied,” Yu said. “Physicians have been inundated with unsustainable panel size and administrative burdens,” and recently there have been more problems due to chronic staffing shortages, she noted. When she heard about a concierge medicine option, she decided to pursue it.
Slower pace, fewer patients
Both Buckman and Yu point to these appealing features of the concierge model:
- A slower pace of patient appointments. A follow-up visit is typically 30 minutes compared to the usual 15 minutes in primary care practice. Concierge physicians see six to eight patients a day, whereas typical primary care physicians might see 20 or more.
- A smaller number of patient/members cared for by the practice — generally in the range of 300 to 900 people. This contrasts with the typical panel sizes for family physicians ranging from 1,888 to 2,504 as reported in a 2025 article in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health. In their prior practices, Buckman’s panel was 2,000 patients and Yu’s was 2,600.
Both doctors now value the luxury of having enough time to get to know their patients as people, understand their medical needs and then proactively help them achieve their health goals.
Buckman grew up in Newton and now lives in Natick. She graduated from Temple University’s Medical School and completed an internal medicine internship and residency at Boston City Hospital. She is board-certified in primary care internal medicine. From 2001 to 2024 she was in practice with the Southborough Medical Group. She came into the Wayland MDVIP practice in 2024 and gradually took over as the prior physician phased out. She has a five-star rating on the U.S. News & World Report and accepts Medicare and many commercial insurance plans.
Yu has an M.D. from the University of Miami and completed a residency in family medicine at Tufts University. She is board certified in family medicine and in obesity medicine. She previously worked at Signature Healthcare in the Brockton area. She was one of only 60 Massachusetts physicians to receive a UnitedHealthcare Hero award in 2025 for excellence in patient experience. She joined the Wayland Personal Physicians group in May 2025. Dr. Yu’s two partners have full panels and have a wait list.
