She Opened Her Fifth DPC Practice in Wisconsin. The Community Showed Up.

Dr. Hemkes had modest expectations for the Sun Prairie ribbon cutting. Her open houses, she told the local paper, are usually lucky to get 5 or 10 people. This one drew enough of a crowd that she mentioned it on the record: “I’m kind of overwhelmed.”

The fifth location of AdvocateMD opened May 21 in Sun Prairie. The practice joins locations in Madison, Fitchburg, Janesville, and Middleton — all owned and operated by the same physician, all running on the same model: no insurance accepted, flat monthly membership, direct access to a primary care doctor for most of what that kind of care handles.

That’s five DPC practices in south-central Wisconsin, built by one physician-owner, without institutional backing.

The Model

Members pay a monthly fee and get access to a physician without insurance billing in the middle. In-office procedures, routine care, and minor surgeries fall under the membership. Discounted medications, lab work, and imaging are available on-site through wholesale pricing. Most members pair the DPC membership with a high-deductible health plan for coverage on major events.

According to data from DPC Frontier and the DPCA, most DPC practices charge between $70 and $100 per month for individual memberships, though pricing varies by practice and region. AdvocateMD hasn’t published its specific rates.

Dr. Hemkes completed medical school in Florida and her residency at Wake Forest University. She lives in Madison with her two daughters. She started with one practice and expanded from there. By the Sun Prairie opening, she’d built what functions like a small regional network, without a private equity partner, employer contracts, or hospital affiliation.

Operating Without a State Framework

Wisconsin doesn’t have a DPC-specific legal statute. Practices work under general contract law. A 2024 Wisconsin bill that would have created a formal framework received bipartisan support but stalled when unrelated provisions got attached to it. Nothing has moved since.

That legal gap adds documentation work. It doesn’t stop DPC practices from opening.

AdvocateMD has been operating across Wisconsin through that legislative cycle and into 2026 without a state-specific law backing it. About 20 states still lack DPC statutes, per DPC Frontier’s state-by-state tracker. Practices in those states document their patient agreements more carefully than those with explicit authorization, but they operate and grow.

Physicians sometimes treat the absence of a state DPC law as a reason to wait. AdvocateMD’s five-location footprint suggests that waiting isn’t required.

Organic Growth vs. Institutional Scale

Most DPC multi-location networks that get press coverage reached scale through institutional capital. Frontier Direct Care built 11 Texas clinics anchored by employer contracts. The Premise-Crossover merger created a $2 billion employer primary care company. Those are real paths, but they depend on institutional relationships to generate patient volume before the first patient walks in.

AdvocateMD took a different route: open a practice, build a panel, open another one. Five times over, in cities within driving distance of each other.

The specific economics of running five sites under one physician-owner aren’t public, so DPC Insider can’t speak to how Dr. Hemkes structures staffing, rent, or operational overhead across locations. What’s visible is the pattern: physician-owned expansion, built one panel at a time, without outside capital.

The crowd at the Sun Prairie open house was larger than she planned for. That’s a small signal, but it points to demand that was already sitting in the community before the practice opened.

What This Means

For physicians in states without DPC legislation: Wisconsin shows the law doesn’t need to exist first. Document carefully, work with an attorney who knows DPC structures in your state, but the absent statute isn’t a stop sign.

Physicians already running a DPC practice and thinking about a second location face a harder problem: operational, not legal. Two sites means two staffing arrangements, two leases, two sets of patient relationships to build from scratch. AdvocateMD has solved that problem five times. The full playbook isn’t public, but the result is.

For residents and physicians just starting to look at DPC: the Sun Prairie ribbon cutting is a small, local version of a pattern that shows up across the country. When a DPC practice opens in a community that didn’t have one, people show up. The demand tends to precede the supply.