A Physician Just Named the Private Equity Firms Circling DPC. The Numbers Behind Her Warning.

Independent physicians owned about 84 percent of primary care practices in 2018. By 2023, that share had fallen to 60 percent, while the count of corporate-affiliated practices climbed 576 percent over the same stretch.

Those figures sit at the center of a June op-ed on KevinMD by Dana Y. Lujan, a health care strategist and DPC advocate. Her argument is direct. Private equity has figured out that direct primary care runs on the exact thing investors want most, and the model built to protect the doctor-patient relationship is quietly being bought.

The revenue that makes DPC a target

Think about what a DPC practice actually sells. A monthly membership. It renews on its own, bills automatically, and rarely touches an insurance claim. Members tend to stay. From a patient’s side, that buys unhurried access to a doctor. From an investor’s side, it looks almost identical to a software subscription.

Lujan says the quiet part plainly: “Recurring cash-pay revenue is the financial profile private equity finds most attractive outside of software companies.” The same predictability that gives a solo physician a stable paycheck also makes a roll-up of dozens of practices easy to underwrite.

The growth is real, and it is not slowing. Lujan cites an 83 percent jump in DPC practice sites and a 78 percent rise in clinicians. She also names names. Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Charlesbank Capital Partners, Blue Sea Capital, Shore Capital Partners, and Revelstoke Capital Partners all hold direct equity in concierge or DPC platforms. These are not fringe players wandering into a niche. They are established funds placing deliberate bets.

What the money is actually buying

The clearest example is Frontier Direct Care, which closed the initial tranche of a $20 million Series B led by Mehshah Capital. The company reported annual recurring revenue north of $25 million, up from roughly $1.5 million in 2022. It now serves more than 100 employer customers, including municipalities and school districts, and grew its membership base more than tenfold in two years.

Notice the shape of that story. This is employer-funded DPC sold as a technology-enabled benefits platform, a long way from a single doctor hanging a shingle. The board added veterans like Richard Barasch and Dr. Eric Bricker. The capital is chasing the version of DPC that scales.

Bigger versions already exist. Marathon Health runs more than 750 centers covering over three million lives. In January, Premise Health and Crossover Health merged into a platform with roughly 900 wellness centers. The word “direct primary care” now stretches across a storefront practice with 500 patients and a national employer network with three million.

The tradeoff nobody prints in the pitch deck

Here is the part worth arguing about. A fund does not buy recurring revenue to leave it alone. It buys to grow the return, and the levers it reaches for are the ones DPC was designed to avoid: larger panels, tighter schedules, more members per physician.

That is the core of Lujan’s warning. When ownership moves from the doctor to an investor, the person deciding how many patients you carry and how long you sit with each one changes too. Autonomy was the whole point for a lot of physicians who left insurance-based medicine. It is also the first thing a spreadsheet tends to question.

None of this makes consolidation villainous. Outside money funds employer contracts, referral networks, and technology that a two-doctor practice can rarely build alone. Patients get access they might not have found otherwise. The honest read is that capital brings reach and speed, and it also brings a new set of hands on the controls. Both things are true at once.

What This Means

If you are a resident weighing DPC, the model you are looking at is bigger and far better funded than it was three years ago. That means more jobs and more stability than the early solo pioneers ever had. It also means “DPC” describes two very different things now, so the first question in any interview is simple: who owns this practice, and who decides how many patients I see?

If you already run a DPC practice, the acquisition call will probably come at some point, and the offer will be built on the recurring revenue you worked to create. Knowing what you would trade before the term sheet lands is worth more than any valuation multiple. Ownership is the asset. It is also the thing that is hardest to buy back.

The membership model won the argument about how primary care should work. The open question is who ends up holding it.