The DPC Summit Opens in New Orleans on July 16. Here Is What Is on the Agenda.

Every year, DPC physicians from across the country show up at a single hotel — to workshop, network, and occasionally disagree about where their model is going. This year, that hotel is the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans, and the 2026 DPC Summit opens July 16.

The conference runs four days — July 16 through 19. It is co-hosted by four organizations: the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians, the Family Medicine Education Consortium, and the Direct Primary Care Alliance. The AAFP has approved up to 23.5 CME credits for the full conference. Cancellation requests must reach AAFP no later than 21 days before the conference opens.

Three Tracks, One Model

The DPC Summit organizes its educational sessions into three tracks, and the structure itself says something about the DPC physician community.

Track 101 is called “Exploring and Starting a Practice.” It is designed for physicians who are considering DPC or are in the earliest stages of launching one — the financial questions, the legal considerations, the marketing basics. The continued existence of this track at a conference now entering its second decade reflects how continuously the model adds new entrants. There is always a fresh cohort of physicians in residency, in burnout, or in both, who are discovering the model for the first time.

Track 201 is “Growing and Sustaining a Practice” — deeper business strategy, office management, and scaling operations. This track exists because the DPC population is no longer made up entirely of new startups. Practices that launched five or seven years ago are now navigating the problems of maturity: staff hiring and retention, expansion decisions, and whether to stay fully independent or join a network.

Track 301 is “Clinical Expertise and Best Practices” — sessions on chronic and acute conditions, women’s health, and care across the patient lifecycle. This track reflects a consistent DPC claim: that having time with patients makes for a different kind of clinician. With panels typically a quarter the size of a conventional insurance-billing practice, DPC physicians have more uninterrupted time per patient encounter, and Track 301 sessions are designed to help them use it.

The Workshop Schedule

The hands-on component runs on Thursday, July 16. Spots are limited and require registration and an additional fee beyond conference admission.

The 2026 workshop list includes podiatry, ENT procedures, point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS), dermatology, osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT), and IUD and Nexplanon insertion and removal. That is a deliberately broad clinical scope — and it reflects a consistent DPC philosophy: the more that can be handled inside the primary care relationship, the fewer specialist referrals a patient needs for routine or minor procedures.

POCUS in particular has become a significant conversation in DPC circles. A physician with ultrasound capability in the exam room can evaluate a gallbladder complaint, assess musculoskeletal injuries, check fetal position, or rule out a pericardial effusion without sending the patient to an imaging center and waiting days for results. The workshop format at the DPC Summit offers the opportunity to actually practice these skills, not just discuss them in session.

What the Main Stage Is Saying

The main stage sessions are organized around themes that reflect the 2026 state of the DPC movement: physician autonomy, practicing to the full scope of training, setting sustainable professional boundaries, and building workflows that scale without burning out the doctor.

That last phrase — “workflows that preserve the joy of practice” — would have seemed unusual at a DPC conference a decade ago. The model was then defined mostly by what it was not: not insurance billing, not corporate employment, not fee-per-visit transactional medicine. The 2026 main stage reflects a model that is increasingly defining itself on its own terms, not in opposition to something else.

The 2026 Context

The DPC Summit opens July 16 — two weeks after two significant events in DPC-adjacent policy.

On July 1, the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge takes effect, giving Medicare Part D beneficiaries access to Wegovy, Zepbound, and Foundayo at a flat $50 monthly copay. DPC physicians can write prescriptions under the Bridge without being enrolled in Medicare. Managing patients on GLP-1 regimens — dose titration, metabolic monitoring, side effect support — is exactly the kind of longitudinal, time-intensive work DPC practices are built around.

Also on July 1, New York’s law requiring physician supervision of nurse practitioners expired without legislative renewal, expanding independent practice for NPs in the state and raising questions about primary care scope and differentiation that the DPC community will almost certainly discuss in New Orleans.

The Hint Health 2026 DPC Trends Report, released in April, found that for the first time, employers now fund the majority of active DPC memberships — more than 7,200 employers are offering DPC as a benefit, and 60% of active memberships are employer-sponsored. That number would have seemed implausible at a DPC Summit five years ago. The model has moved from a patient-funded experiment to a mainstream employer benefit.

All of that context arrives in the room with the physicians who attend. The summit tends to function as a temperature check: what is working, what has changed, what the next year requires.

What This Means

The DPC Summit is not the only DPC conference — the Hint Summit in Nashville in April featured a CMS keynote — but it is the largest annual gathering specifically for DPC practitioners, co-organized by the medical community’s own professional associations. If a physician might be considering the model, Track 101 is designed to give honest answers from people who have already made the transition. If the goal is growing an established practice, Track 201 offers structured curriculum rather than blog posts and podcasts.

Registration is open at dpcsummit.org. The early bird discount deadline has passed, but standard registration remains open. The conference social on Saturday evening is at the Audubon Aquarium.

New Orleans tends to extend conversations beyond the session rooms — into dinner tables and late evenings in a city that is not in any hurry to wind down. For a model that runs on peer community and shared conviction, that is probably not a coincidence.