CMS's Top Medicare Official Is Keynoting a DPC Conference This Week

Three months ago, DPC membership fees became HSA-eligible for the first time. That was a policy change. What’s happening this Tuesday in Nashville looks more like a signal.

Hint Summit 2026 runs April 8 through 11 at the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the keynote lineup reads like DPC has graduated from niche healthcare experiment to something the federal government wants to talk about publicly.

Who’s Showing Up

Chris Klomp, the Deputy Administrator of CMS and Director of the Center for Medicare, is delivering a keynote. He also serves as Senior Advisor to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Before joining the administration, Klomp was a VP at Bain Capital’s private equity group and built Collective Medical, a real-time care collaboration network that PointClickCare acquired in 2020.

A CMS official speaking at a DPC conference isn’t routine. Medicare doesn’t cover DPC memberships. CMS has no regulatory authority over the model. The fact that Klomp is on stage anyway says something about where the agency thinks primary care delivery is heading.

The other headliner is Bill Frist, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and a heart transplant surgeon. Frist now runs Frist Cressey Ventures, a healthcare-focused venture firm that invested $12 million in One to One Health back in January to scale AI-enabled employer primary care. When the politician who led the Senate during the Medicare Modernization Act starts writing checks to DPC-adjacent companies, the money is following the policy.

What’s on the Agenda

Beyond the keynotes, the three-day program covers ground that would have seemed niche even two years ago. Sessions include pediatric DPC (a category that barely existed outside a handful of practices), employer relationship strategies, women’s health in DPC settings, and a full day dedicated to regulatory updates.

Day three is an optional Growth Bootcamp aimed at clinicians and clinical leaders who want practical playbooks for scaling.

Hint Health CEO Zak Holdsworth is speaking, as you’d expect from the host company. But the 60-plus speaker roster goes well beyond Hint’s orbit, pulling from DPC founders, benefit advisors, and health system leaders.

One detail worth flagging: this is the first year the summit offers CME credits, up to 22 of them, for MDs, DOs, NPs, and PAs. That’s a quiet but meaningful shift. When a DPC industry event carries accredited continuing education, it stops being just a conference and starts functioning as professional infrastructure.

The Timing Matters

This summit lands at a specific moment. DPC practices now serve roughly 1% of the American population, with about 1.4 million members across 2,800-plus practice sites. Employer-sponsored memberships make up 58% of all DPC memberships, up 18 points since 2022. The HSA eligibility rules that took effect January 1 opened the door for 40 million HSA holders to pay for DPC with pre-tax dollars.

Those numbers explain why a CMS official and a former Senate leader are on the bill. DPC isn’t asking for attention anymore. It’s generating the kind of enrollment and employer adoption numbers that make federal officials show up on their own.

What This Means

If you’re running a DPC practice or building toward one, the Hint Summit speaker list tells you something about where the model sits in 2026. Federal officials don’t keynote conferences for movements they consider marginal. Venture capital doesn’t flow to care models the government might restrict.

The CME accreditation is the quieter signal, but it might matter more long-term. Education that counts toward licensure requirements gives physicians a reason to engage with DPC-specific content on the same terms as any other specialty conference. That’s how a movement becomes a standard part of the profession.

Nashville this week won’t produce legislation or change reimbursement rates. But the people in the room, and the people on stage, tell you which direction the current is running.