When the State Makes Healthcare Harder, DPC Doctors Make It Possible: Inside Dr. Emily Holt's Year Two at Poppy Direct Care
- Nathalia Hyland
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
One year ago, Dr. Emily Holt opened the doors of Poppy Direct Care in a 100-year-old house in Uptown New Orleans. Attendees of the 2025 DPC Summit walked through her clinic, met her patients in the neighborhood pizza shop, and watched a mission-driven family physician build something real from the ground up.
A year later, almost everything around her has changed. What hasn't changed is Dr. Holt.
A Year of Building, Quietly and Intentionally
Poppy's panel has more than doubled. Dr. Holt is preparing to opt out of Medicare. Word of mouth, plus an authentic Instagram and TikTok presence she built from scratch, has become her entire growth engine. She's now paying two part-time employees, covering her overhead in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New Orleans, and bringing money home.
But she's also doing something most DPC physicians will recognize: she's slow-rolling on purpose. She has three boys growing up fast. She blocks her schedule for parent-teacher conferences. She makes time for the things a decade of corporate medicine took from her.
"I'm filling my cup in more ways than financially," she told Maryal on this week's episode. That sentence is the quiet thesis of year two at Poppy.
The Louisiana Landscape Got Harder. She Got Louder.
Since Dr. Holt's last appearance on the podcast, Louisiana has continued to tighten the screws on reproductive healthcare.
Every Planned Parenthood in the state has closed. Mifepristone and misoprostol remain controlled substances, and Dr. Holt is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging that classification. The 340B program changes will likely cut small clinics like Poppy and Dr. Byron Jasper's Baija Charitable Alliance out of pricing that helped them serve uninsured patients. The Louisiana Health Department is rolling out new requirements for rapid STI testing programs that would cost participating clinics about forty-five dollars per patient, with state reimbursement of one dollar per patient.
About thirty percent of Dr. Holt's panel is uninsured: bartenders, carpenters, full-time caregivers, artists, freelance writers, musicians. The cultural backbone of New Orleans. People who make too much to qualify for Medicaid and not enough to buy a marketplace plan after 2026 premiums skyrocketed.
So Dr. Holt started a free Tuesday night clinic offering birth control consults and rapid STI testing, staffed by vetted Tulane undergraduates. She works with Reproductive Health Access Project (RHAP) as a Louisiana cluster co-leader. She joined a lawsuit that employed physicians have told her they couldn't touch without risking their jobs.
"If you can't stand for something, you will fall for anything." That's what she tells her three boys. They're watching.
Why DPC Made All of This Possible
None of this happens inside a corporate contract. Dr. Holt is explicit about that. The OBGYN who wanted to join her lawsuit couldn't, because her employer said no. Physician friends in Louisiana can't speak publicly about their state's healthcare crisis because they fear for their livelihoods.
DPC gave Dr. Holt the autonomy to give her patients autonomy. In a state that routinely marginalizes and disenfranchises people, she has built a clinic where patients tell her, unprompted, that they're relieved to have found a doctor who trusts them.
That is the model working exactly as it was designed to work.
How You Can Help Right Now
Dr. Holt needs an autoclave. Without one, she can't offer affordable IUD insertions, which means patients in New Orleans who need emergency contraception or long-acting reversible contraceptives have one fewer place to go. She recently had to send a patient to a health department clinic with a wait of more than seven days because Poppy didn't yet have the equipment to insert an IUD that week.
Every dollar goes directly toward equipment that expands reproductive healthcare access in a state where access keeps shrinking.
Also from My DPC Story: Voting is open for the Battle of the Support Stack, the Toolkit's second annual community vote on the tools DPC physicians actually trust, across ten categories. Cast your vote and you're entered to win the California DPC Summit bundle, a $250 value going to three physicians. Voting closes June 30.
Listen to Dr. Emily Holt's full conversation with Maryal on the My DPC Story podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. For more on the DPC movement, free resources, and the DPC Toolkit Magazine, visit mydpcstory.com.
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