The 2026 DPC Physician of the Year Built Her Practice to Serve Black Women. Her State Has the Second-Highest Black Maternal Mortality Rate in the Country.

Practice Spotlight by DPC Insider
#practice-spotlight#health-equity#Black-womens-health#Georgia#DPC-Summit-2026#menopause-care#physician-independence
Sources: Sol DPC — Direct Primary Care for Black Women in Atlanta · Cooke's Direct Primary Care practice prioritizes patient care — The Atlanta Voice · 2026 DPC Summit — Direct Primary Care Alliance · Black maternal mortality rate still much higher than in other women — Axios Atlanta, April 15, 2026 · Black Maternal Health Week puts focus on improving outcomes — WRDW, April 16, 2026 · Confronting the Crisis: Actions to Address Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Among Black Women in Rural Georgia — PMC · Study: Race and zip code determine healthcare access for millions of Americans, Georgia data shows — WALB, February 26, 2026 · Sol Direct Primary Care — NextMD Practice Listing · What No One Told Us: The Black Woman's Guide to Menopause — Dr. Michelle Cooke (Amazon)

Black women in Georgia are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women in the same state. Georgia’s maternal mortality rate sits at 66.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, the second-highest in the country. The CDC has documented that more than 80 percent of those deaths are preventable. Most of them happen not in labor and delivery, but in the months before and after pregnancy — the months that belong to primary care.

Dr. Michelle Cooke, MD, trained at Morehouse School of Medicine and completed her residency at Atlanta Medical Center. She has practiced in Atlanta for more than 20 years. She knows those numbers because she saw their origins in exam rooms where patients were given 15 minutes to explain years of accumulated, inadequately treated illness. Three years ago, she left that system and opened a direct primary care practice built explicitly for the patients it had most consistently failed.

Last week at the 2026 DPC Summit in New Orleans, the field recognized her with the DPC Physician of the Year Award.

The Practice

Sol Direct Primary Care opened in May 2023 off Cascade Road in Atlanta and relocated to 2860 Church Street in East Point, Georgia, in May 2024. Its stated mission: to honor, uplift, and prioritize Black women’s health and wellness. The practice is physician-owned and physician-led. Dr. Cooke is the only clinician.

The Sol Complete membership is $150 per month. It includes an annual exam with labs, four office visits, unlimited telehealth visits, and unlimited direct access to Dr. Cooke by phone, text, and patient portal. There are no copays, no claims forms, and no billing layers. While Sol’s focus is Black women, the practice welcomes any patient who aligns with its mission.

Dr. Cooke sees patients for family medicine, women’s health, menopause care, chronic disease management, and lifestyle medicine. She is also a certified menopause practitioner — a credential that matters because Black women reach menopause earlier on average than white women, experience more severe symptoms, and are less likely to receive evidence-based treatment. To extend her reach, she wrote What No One Told Us: The Black Woman’s Guide to Menopause, a book designed to help Black women understand what the standard healthcare encounter rarely explains to them. Sol also runs the Sol Fit Club, a physician-led weight loss program using metabolic testing and FDA-approved medications.

Dr. Cooke graduated from Spelman College in 2007, summa cum laude, with a degree in Spanish and Pre-Medicine. She earned her MD from Morehouse School of Medicine in 2011 as an honors graduate, then served as Chief Resident in Family Medicine at Atlanta Medical Center. Her practice is inseparable from her geography and her training — she is a product of Atlanta’s historically Black academic institutions, practicing in a community that shares her background and her needs.

The Award and Its Context

The 2026 DPC Summit drew more than 400 physicians and practice builders to New Orleans from July 16 through 19. It is co-organized by the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians, the DPC Alliance, and the Family Medicine Education Consortium. The DPC Physician of the Year Award goes to a clinician who has made outstanding contributions to the movement and a demonstrated commitment to the community they serve.

Dr. Cooke won it the year after the inaugural award was given, while the DPC movement is having a broader conversation about who it serves. A study published in Health Affairs last year documented that the share of independently owned DPC and concierge practices had dropped from 84 percent to 60 percent between 2018 and 2023, while corporate-affiliated practices grew by more than 500 percent. The critique that DPC increasingly serves wealthy patients willing to pay above-market fees — and who also maintain insurance — has some evidence behind it.

Dr. Cooke’s practice represents a different version of what the model can be.

The Structural Problem

The barriers Black women face in the standard healthcare system are not only financial. Research consistently documents that Black patients have their symptoms dismissed more often, their pain underestimated more frequently, and their visits cut shorter than comparable white patients. Georgia adds its own structural weight: 12 percent of the state’s residents are uninsured, compared to 8 percent nationally, because the state did not expand Medicaid. Rural counties have almost no obstetric care. Primary care shortages are severe in the communities with the highest rates of chronic disease.

Nationally, Black women die from pregnancy-related complications at a rate of 44.8 per 100,000 live births — compared to 14.2 for white women, 12.1 for Hispanic women, and 18.1 for Asian women. In Georgia, the disparity is wider than the national average. The majority of those deaths are preventable with access to consistent, attentive primary care.

What $150 per month buys at Sol Direct Primary Care is not primarily a different price point. It is the removal of the structural pressure that turns a primary care visit into a transaction. When a physician controls her own panel size and her own schedule, she can spend 45 minutes on a menopause consultation, follow up by text three days later, and build the kind of longitudinal relationship that is documented to produce better health outcomes. That is what the flat-fee structure enables — and it is the thing most patients of the standard healthcare system have not had access to, regardless of their insurance status.

What This Means

The DPC Physician of the Year Award is not a clinical outcomes measure. It recognizes a physician who used the structural freedoms of independent practice to serve a community in a way the standard system was not serving it.

For physicians who might be exploring DPC or building their own practice, Dr. Cooke’s model is a concrete proof that the economics of independent primary care do not require a wealthy patient panel. The model works when a physician chooses the community first and builds the practice around that choice. What changes is not the underlying economics of membership-based care — it is the decision about who the practice is for.

For a movement that is simultaneously celebrating a first year in which employers pay the majority of DPC memberships, the Physician of the Year award is a reminder that employer-sponsored DPC is one version of the model, not the whole of it. Black women in East Point, Georgia, who you might find driving 20 miles to find a physician who actually listens to them — that is also a use case the model was built for, and in the hands of the right physician, it is delivering.

Sol Direct Primary Care is not a policy solution to Georgia’s maternal health crisis. No single practice is. But the physician who runs it just received the field’s highest recognition for her work in it. The movement noticed.