A Second DPC Practice Just Joined a Holding Company. Its Website Says It Is Not Private Equity.

A twelve-year-old direct primary care practice in East Texas picked a partner this week, and it was not a hospital system.

MyMD Select, which runs clinics in Nacogdoches, Lufkin and Longview, announced on July 30 that it joined Timshel Health, a national holding company of direct primary care practices. The two companies say they plan to open new clinics across Texas.

That makes two. Timshel’s first acquisition, Anovia Health in Wisconsin, closed in 2025.

Two deals falls well short of consolidation, but it is where a pattern starts, and this pattern turns on how the buyer is capitalized.

The Money Behind It Has No Exit Clock

Timshel’s chief executive is Mac Findlay, and the company is backed by Hunter Search Capital, which lists it in the portfolio as a long-term hold. That is search fund language. An entrepreneur raises money to buy one company, then runs it, and the investors are not waiting on a fund that has to wind down.

The company puts it bluntly on its own site: “Timshel Health is not a private equity firm.” Its stated capital sources are healthcare entrepreneurs and family offices. It adds that “unlike a private equity firm, our investors do not expect a sale or return in the near-term,” and tells prospective sellers that “your practice remains your practice.”

The Business Wire announcement carries the same message. Timshel “eschews the traditional ‘roll-up’ playbook,” and its practices “are kept separate and operate decentralized.”

Read that against what DPC physicians have been arguing all year. In June, a health care strategist named the private equity firms already holding stakes in DPC and concierge platforms and made the case that recurring membership revenue is exactly what those funds are shopping for. Timshel’s marketing is a direct answer to that argument.

None of it is enforceable. A promise on a website is not a covenant, and no press release has ever announced that a founder lost control. The structure underneath, though, is real and it matters. A closed-end fund raised in 2021 is typically structured around a ten-year life, and that horizon eventually decides panel size. Timshel says its own investors do not expect a sale or return in the near term. That is the whole distinction, and it is the one physicians should ask about before signing anything.

What Timshel Already Owns

Anovia Health is the reason this deal deserves attention rather than a shrug.

Founded in Green Bay in 2021, Anovia now runs 13 community clinics and four employer-based sites across the state, serving about 40,000 patients. The company says 99 percent of them arrive through an employer relationship. Sabina Singh, M.D., co-founded the practice and is its president and chief medical officer.

The outcome data got a fuller airing on July 28, when WisBusiness reported on two evaluations by Phyx Innovation Labs, authored by Edmund Billings, M.D., and Steven Waldren, M.D., M.S. The headline case study followed Gamber Johnson, a Stevens Point manufacturer, and credited $684,779 in verified 2025 savings across seven categories of care. Per-member-per-year medical and pharmacy claims costs fell 8.1 percent between December 2021 and March 2026 while the commercial benchmark rose 38 percent, putting the employer roughly 26 percent below benchmark.

The clinical numbers in the second report are the ones DPC physicians will recognize. Average visit length nearly doubled, from 14.9 minutes to 29.4. Provider burnout dropped 48 percent. Panels ran about 850 patients per provider against a national average above 2,000.

Those reports evaluated one company’s clients. Treat them as a case study rather than a national finding.

Employer Contracts Are What Make a Practice Buyable

The quotes in the announcement say almost nothing. Findlay said Timshel “will help MyMD Select innovate and scale while preserving what makes it special.” Founder Jeremy Smith, M.D., said Findlay “understands what makes MyMD Select special.”

What the two practices have in common says more. Anovia sells to employers across Wisconsin. MyMD Select, founded by Smith in 2014, serves thousands of individual members plus dozens of small and mid-sized businesses in East Texas.

Employer books are the asset. A membership panel of individuals churns one household at a time. A signed employer contract renews on a date, covers a defined population, and can be modeled by someone building a financial forecast. If you have ever wondered why the employer channel keeps showing up in DPC acquisition news, that is why. It is the part of a DPC practice that looks like a business to a buyer.

What This Means

If you run a solo or small DPC practice and you are within a decade of stepping back, your succession options have historically been thin. Sell the panel to a hospital system, hand it to an associate who may not want the risk, or close the doors and write letters to 600 patients. A buyer offering cash, autonomy language and no near-term resale is a third door, and more of them are likely coming.

If you are earlier in your career, the useful move is to watch Anovia rather than the press releases. Panel sizes, visit lengths, membership prices and whether Singh is still in her chair in 2028 will tell you what the decentralized promise was worth. That evidence will exist. It just takes time to accumulate.

For everyone else in DPC, the number to track is three. A second deal is a preference. A fifth is a strategy, and by then the practices signing on will not all be the ones that went looking.