Dr. Aerie Chung opened a Direct Specialty Care infectious disease practice at the end of 2019, then the pandemic arrived and, as an ID doctor watching the abuse aimed at her specialty, her first instinct was to become invisible. She stopped marketing infectious disease, added integrative care and IV infusions, and now has more acupuncture visits than medical ones.

In his first week at Fischer Clinic, a new patient told Dr. Brewer Eberly, I am looking forward to dying with you. A third generation family physician who nearly left medicine in his third year of medical school, Eberly got to Raleigh through years of friendship rather than a job board, and started with 170 patients another physician had onboarded for him.

Dr. Tiffanny Blythe priced Blue Lotus Family Medicine so low she barely covered her living expenses, until the furnace broke and the math stopped working. She raised 85 percent of her panel from $50 to $75 with three months of notice and lost a handful of people. The higher price funds a scholarship program with no application and no gatekeeping, where a patient can pay as little as $5 a month.