One of the Country's Largest Accounting Firms Just Told Employers How to Add DPC

Analysis by DPC Insider
#employer-sponsored DPC#benefits consulting#self-funded plans#Plante Moran#DPC for employers
Sources: How a direct primary care model can support employees and your organization · Hint Health Releases 2026 Direct Primary Care Trends Report: Data Shows DPC Has Moved From Niche Alternative to National Healthcare Infrastructure · DPC Frontier: Dispensing Medications

Employers hear about direct primary care from their benefits consultants, usually in a renewal meeting where the numbers have turned ugly. So it matters when one of the largest accounting and consulting firms in the country starts making the DPC case itself.

On July 7, Plante Moran published guidance telling employer clients that a direct primary care model can deliver more effective care to employees at a more affordable price. The authors are Jonathon Trionfi, a partner in the firm’s group benefits and brokerage practice, and Claudia Hermiz. The audience is CFOs and HR leaders. The opening claim is blunt: the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance is rising at an unsustainable rate, and the fee-for-service system carries much of the blame.

DPC physicians have been saying that for fifteen years. Hearing it from a firm that audits mid-market companies is new.

The Math Plante Moran Shows Its Clients

The guidance walks employers through numbers that DPC physicians already know by heart. A traditional primary care panel runs around 2,400 patients per doctor. Seeing even 1% of that panel each day means 20 patients in an eight-hour shift, which works out to 20 minutes per visit. The authors put it plainly: “Realistically, 10 of those 20 minutes will be spent documenting.”

Then comes the contrast. DPC visits typically run 30 to 60 minutes because, in the firm’s words, “the doctors have no incentive to maximize their number of patients in a given day.”

The piece also names two operational details that rarely surface in employer-facing content. A DPC office can stock and dispense generic medications at cost, avoiding the markups that apply when prescriptions route through pharmacies under traditional insurance. And DPC doctors can run peer-to-peer consults with specialists, which keeps more treatment inside the primary care relationship instead of generating a chain of referrals.

One note for physicians reading that dispensing line: physician dispensing regulations vary by state, and you’re responsible for verifying your state’s requirements. DPC Frontier maintains a state-by-state guide.

DPC Comes Last in a Four-Step Sequence

The structure of the advice reveals how consultants think about the model. Plante Moran positions DPC as the final layer of a cost-containment sequence. First an employer shifts to a self-insured funding model, or level funding for smaller and more risk-averse companies. Then it adds a group stop-loss captive to absorb catastrophic claims. Then it contracts a transparent pharmacy benefit manager to strip out spread pricing and rebate games. Only then does it add direct primary care.

That ordering treats DPC as infrastructure. It plugs into a self-funded plan the same way a captive or a transparent PBM does, and it arrives after the employer has taken control of its own claims data and spending.

The mechanics also deserve a close read. In the firm’s framing, an employer effectively opens a clinic or buys time in a clinic, and that clinic remains an independent physician’s office the employer doesn’t control. That independence clause is doing real work. It points the consulting channel toward contracting with existing independent DPC practices rather than building captive worksite clinics from scratch.

The Messenger Is the Story

Employer-sponsored DPC has been growing for years. Hint Health’s 2026 trends report found that employers now fund 60% of active DPC memberships, and more than 7,200 employers offer a DPC benefit.

What’s different here is who’s carrying the message. Plante Moran sells audits, tax work and consulting to thousands of mid-market companies. The firm has no DPC product to promote and no membership platform to grow. Its advice shows up in renewal meetings, audit relationships and CFO conversations where nobody has ever said the words “direct primary care” out loud.

A conference talk persuades people who already showed up curious. A benefits advisor with the client’s financials open on the table persuades people who came to talk about something else entirely.

What This Means

If you run a DPC practice, employer interest may start arriving through channels you never marketed to. A broker or benefits consultant who read this kind of guidance will call with questions about per-member pricing, panel capacity and how quickly you could absorb 40 employees. Practices that have those answers ready will have a different conversation than practices working them out on the phone.

If you’re still considering the model, the demand side is institutionalizing. The pitch you would have had to make yourself, employer by employer, is being made for you by firms with client lists most physicians could never reach. Most DPC practices charge between $70 and $100 per month for individual members, according to DPC Frontier and DPCA data, and costs vary by practice and location. Employer contracts layered on top of that base can change the revenue math for a new practice in its first year.

The four-step sequence will keep showing up in benefits consulting because each step feeds the next. Self-funded employers see their own claims. Employers who see their claims go looking for the spending they can actually influence. Primary care sits at the front of nearly all of it. Consultants have now noticed, and they talk to a lot more employers than DPC physicians do.