Mending Access Wants to Be the Rails Between DPC Practices and Employer Health Plans

Industry News by DPC Insider
#employer-dpc#mending#taro-health#tpa#self-funded-employers#dpc-infrastructure
Sources: Mending Launches Mending Access, Bringing Integrated Direct Primary Care to TPAs and Self-Funded Employers Nationwide · Where HSA Policy Stands: 4 Notes

One of the persistent headaches of employer-sponsored DPC has been the plumbing. A self-funded employer wants to offer direct primary care as a benefit. A DPC practice wants employer patients. In theory, everybody wins. In practice, connecting the two through the existing benefits administration infrastructure has been a manual, frustrating process.

Mending, a company you might remember as Taro Health, thinks it has the fix. The company just launched Mending Access, a platform that plugs DPC practices directly into the workflows of third-party administrators and self-funded employers. It handles eligibility management, automated data exchange, and claims-level reporting on utilization.

The numbers are already real: 100,000 covered lives since the January launch, operating in 12 states, with plans to expand to 25 or more by year’s end.

Why the TPA Connection Matters

If you’re a DPC physician, you might not spend much time thinking about TPAs. But if you want employer patients, TPAs are often the gatekeepers. They administer the health plans for self-funded employers, handling eligibility, claims processing, and reporting. When a DPC practice isn’t integrated into that system, the employer is essentially running two parallel benefit structures. That’s friction, and friction kills adoption.

Jay Kempton, CEO of The Kempton Group Administrators, put it bluntly: “Employers want the accessibility and physician relationships that DPC offers, but need transparency” and automation to make it work within their existing plan administration.

Mending Access attempts to solve this by making DPC look like any other benefit from the TPA’s perspective. Eligibility syncs automatically. Payments tie to actual utilization. The employer gets the same kind of reporting they’d see from a traditional plan component. For the DPC practice, the promise is more employer patients without the administrative overhead of managing those relationships manually.

The Taro-to-Mending Pivot

Mending’s backstory is worth noting. The company started as Taro Health, offering ACA Marketplace health plans in Maine and Oklahoma that were built around DPC. It was an interesting concept: an insurance product that used DPC as the primary care layer instead of a traditional network.

The rebrand to Mending in 2025 and the launch of Mending Access signals a strategic shift. Rather than being the insurance carrier, Mending is now positioning itself as the infrastructure layer that connects DPC practices to the existing employer benefits ecosystem. It’s a different bet: instead of replacing the insurance product, work within the existing TPA and self-funded employer structure to make DPC a standard benefit option.

For qualifying DPC practices, participation is available at no cost. That’s a notable detail. The business model appears to be built around the employer and TPA side, not around charging DPC practices for access.

The Bigger Picture

This launch doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Since January 2026, DPC membership fees qualify as HSA-eligible expenses for individuals under $150/month and families under $300/month. That regulatory shift removed one of the biggest barriers to employer-sponsored DPC. Bronze plan enrollment on the ACA exchanges jumped from 30% to 40% this year as more people moved to HSA-compatible coverage.

With over 7,200 employers already offering DPC benefits and more than half of all DPC memberships now employer-sponsored, the demand side is established. What’s been missing is the connective tissue between DPC practices and the administrative systems employers already use. That’s the gap Mending Access is trying to fill.

What This Means

If you’re running a DPC practice and you’ve been fielding interest from employers but struggling with the administrative reality of onboarding them, this is worth watching. A platform that handles eligibility and reporting integration with TPAs could meaningfully reduce the friction of taking on employer groups.

If you’re considering DPC, the employer channel continues to mature. The infrastructure is catching up to the demand. Two years ago, employer-sponsored DPC meant a lot of manual work and custom arrangements. Products like Mending Access suggest that’s changing.

The question worth asking: does making DPC fit neatly into the existing TPA infrastructure preserve what makes DPC different, or does it start pulling practices back toward the administrative complexity they left behind? That tension won’t be resolved by any single product. But 100,000 covered lives in three months suggests employers and TPAs are ready to find out.