When the Rug Gets Pulled: What Three Physicians Did Next

(L to R) Drs. Shayne Poulin, Shannon Connolly, Amy Tressan of Open Arms Primary Care

In December 2025, Dr. Shannon Connolly, Dr. Shayne Poulin, and Dr. Amy Tressan did not choose to leave their patients. Their patients were taken from them.

Melody Health, the primary care practice where they had spent years building something they believed in - comprehensive, trauma-informed, reproductive health-integrated primary care - for one of Orange County's most underserved populations closed almost overnight. The passage of HR 1 defunded Planned Parenthood, the organization within which Melody Health operated, and without their health plan contracts, there was no path forward. Thirteen thousand plus patients. Seven health centers. Dozens of staff members. Gone in a matter of weeks.

If you are skeptical of Direct Primary Care, this is the part of the story worth sitting with. Because what happened to Melody Health is not a DPC story. It is a story about what happens when physicians build something extraordinary inside a system that was never fully in their control.

And what these three doctors did next is where DPC enters the picture.

The Phone Call

Dr. Poulin called Dr. Connolly one night when the grief was still raw and the job postings were deeply uninspiring. She did not call to commiserate. She called to say: we built it once, we can build it again. And this time, it will be ours.

"It just felt so resolved. It just felt like there was no choice. We had to build it." — Dr. Shayne Poulin

By the time they hung up, the decision was made. They looped in Dr. Tressan. And within four months of Melody Health closing its doors, Open Arms Primary Care opened theirs.

March 1st. Orange County, California. Three physician co-owners, equal shares, one exam table sourced from a Nextdoor listing, and a waiting room they call a living room because that is exactly what it feels like.

For the DPC Skeptics

If you have ever rolled your eyes at Direct Primary Care, if you have heard "concierge medicine" and assumed that meant wealthy patients, boutique amenities, and physicians opting out of the hard work of caring for the underserved, Open Arms Primary Care is worth your attention.

Dr. Connolly, Dr. Poulin, and Dr. Tressan spent their careers at the intersection of primary care and reproductive justice. Their patient population at Melody Health was 95% Medi-Cal. They provided abortion care, gender affirming care, behavioral health, and substance use disorder treatment. They ran WIC sites. They were not serving the worried well. They were serving the people most likely to fall through every crack in the system.

"What we built at Melody was a place where a population of people who had not felt seen and heard in healthcare finally felt seen and heard."

— Dr. Shannon Connolly

And when that practice closed, their first instinct was not to find a comfortable employed position somewhere. It was to figure out how to keep serving those same patients.

DPC was not their first choice because it was easy. It was their choice because it was the only model that gave them enough autonomy to provide the full scope of care their community needed, without a health plan, a hospital system, or a corporate employer deciding what was and was not covered.

Dr. Connolly said it plainly: they had to close Melody because they were unwilling to cut off their reproductive health service lines. In DPC, no one can make that call for them.

That is not a luxury. That is a lifeline.

For the DPC Believers

If you are already in this movement, you know the feeling they are describing. The moment the model clicks. The moment you realize that the business side, intimidating as it is, is actually just the price of freedom.

What Open Arms adds to the DPC conversation is something we do not talk about enough: what happens when physicians are forced into this transition without a runway. No savings plan. No gradual panel build. No soft landing.

They pulled money from retirement accounts. They launched a GoFundMe. They found their clinic space in a parking lot conversation that could only be described as the universe course-correcting. Half of their $50,000 startup budget came from the generosity of strangers who believed in what they were building.

"I was really hopeful that we would get a thousand dollars or something. And then we got so much support because I think our story really resonated with a lot of people." — Dr. Shannon Connolly

And they opened anyway.

They also did something structurally important that the DPC community should pay attention to: they built a three-physician partnership with equal ownership from day one, with only one physician seeing patients initially to keep overhead manageable. The other two kept outside income while running the business side. It is a model that protected all three of them financially while getting the practice off the ground fast.

"We wanted to destroy this sort of hierarchical notion of practice and really recognize that we are each contributing perhaps different things, but we are each contributing a lot." — Dr. Shannon Connolly

They did not wait until conditions were perfect. Conditions were not going to be perfect. They built the plane while flying it, and they did so with a clarity of values that made every hard decision easier.

What This Story Is Really About

Whether you are a DPC physician, a skeptic, a medical student trying to figure out what kind of doctor you want to be, or someone who has simply had one too many experiences of being stonewalled by a call center when you just needed to talk to your doctor, this story is for you.

It is about what medicine looks like when physicians refuse to outsource their values. It is about three women who looked at the wreckage of something they loved and decided to build something better. It is about an 86-year-old patient who just needed someone to put their phone number in her favorites list so she could actually reach her doctor.

"It just took me a few minutes to get to the core of the matter, which was a communication problem. She could not communicate with her doctor, and there was nobody who was responsive when she tried. All of those things were things that I could easily address in my practice. It is about the fact that patients do not need much from us. They just need us to help them.

"I would say start by identifying your core values as a physician. Those values are the things that I can not compromise on. Any future practice of medicine that I do has to be in alignment with those values. And if it is not, it is a non-starter." — Dr. Shannon Connolly

Open Arms Primary Care is currently accepting new patients in Orange County, California.

To hear the full conversation with Dr. Shannon Connolly and Dr. Shayne Poulin, listen to the latest episode of My DPC Story wherever you get your podcasts. Extended conversation available commercial-free at patreon.com/mydpcstoryfan.

Learn more at mydpcstory.com.

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