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.

A health system vice president told Dr. Kirsten Lin that physicians cannot be trusted to manage their own schedules. She and Dr. Natalie Gentile met at a DPC Summit, spent six months of weekends vaccinating independent clinicians and homebound patients, then launched Direct Care Physicians of Pittsburgh in January 2022, the first managed services organization built for Direct Primary Care.

Dr. Erika Bliss was in the room when the term Direct Primary Care was written into Washington state law. She co-founded Qliance in 2007, ran it as CEO through seven clinics and a Medicaid contract, and watched it close in 2017. She rebuilt as a solo doctor in Seattle with one medical assistant and about 400 patients.