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.

Dr. Brian Ostick is an ER medical director who spent three years as his wife's unpaid chief marketing officer and, in his words, chief furniture officer. He now sees patients one day a week at Health and Healing Direct Primary Care with a panel capped near 50, mostly the dads of families already enrolled. He and Dr. Aimee Ostick paid off $550,000 in student debt in six years before opening.

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.