Medscape Ran Four Direct Primary Care Articles in 17 Days. The Latest Has a Chicago Founder Saying the Medicine Was the Easy Part.

Practice Spotlight by DPC Insider
#Medscape#practice launch#physician perspective#urban DPC#Chicago#startup lessons#physician burnout
Sources: What I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Direct Primary Care — Medscape, July 31, 2026 · Why Patients Are Paying Out of Pocket for Primary Care — Medscape, July 15, 2026 · Why Texting in Direct Primary Care Works Best With Clear Boundaries — Medscape, July 21, 2026 · Direct Primary Care: Pro-Patient, Not Anti-Insurance — Medscape, July 22, 2026 · Avaya Med Direct Primary Care — Chicago, IL

Four direct primary care commentaries ran in Medscape in 17 days last month. All four featured the same physician — Dr. Rajdeep Dhami, a family doctor who runs a DPC practice in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood — as the author. The most recent, published Friday July 31, was on what she wishes she’d known.

Medscape, a physician news and CME site, published four DPC commentaries from the same Chicago physician in 17 days — covering patient decision-making, physician communication, the anti-insurance objection, and what it actually takes to launch a practice. Medscape ran each piece, and that is its own signal.

What the newest piece actually says

Dr. Dhami’s July 31 piece is a brief video commentary. “The medicine was the easy part,” she says of starting a DPC practice. The harder work she describes is everything that surrounds it: operations, pricing, messaging, workflow, legal paperwork, patient education, community, trust, and brand.

That observation isn’t new to anyone already inside the DPC community. Liberation from insurance billing doesn’t mean liberation from administrative complexity. The form changes. The volume doesn’t always.

Delivering that message in Medscape — where a burned-out hospitalist or a second-year family medicine resident might encounter it — is a different kind of reach than a DPC conference panel or a dedicated Facebook group. That reader hasn’t already decided to start a practice. That’s exactly who needs it.

The practice behind the articles

Dr. Dhami runs Avaya Med out of Chicago’s West Town neighborhood — not a rural market and not a wealthy suburb. The practice charges $200 per month for adult members and sees patients as young as five. Visits run 30 to 60 minutes. Members reach the practice by phone, text, email, video, or in person, and Avaya Med offers discounted pricing on labs, imaging, and medications.

Urban DPC at $200 per month in a dense city neighborhood is a meaningful data point in a persistent conversation about where DPC works and where it doesn’t. The recurring concern — that DPC prices out patients in urban markets with competitive insurance options — runs into practices like Avaya Med. The practice is there anyway.

Her presence across the earlier Medscape pieces gives the July 31 video additional context. The July 15 piece and the July 31 piece — both by Dhami — cover both sides of the same transaction. The earlier one is about why patients pay out of pocket for primary care. The later one is about what a physician has to build to serve them. Together, they’re a more complete portrait of what a DPC relationship involves than either piece offers alone. The July 15 piece notes that patients who choose DPC are often choosing time, access, continuity, and a physician who knows their story — not a pure price decision. The physician building that practice is building something that requires decisions across pricing, workflow, community, and trust, in addition to all the clinical work.

What the operational pieces signal

The July 21 piece on texting is worth pausing on for a different reason. Its title — “Why Texting in Direct Primary Care Works Best With Clear Boundaries” — signals operational content, not an argument about whether the model works.

The fourth piece — titled “Direct Primary Care: Pro-Patient, Not Anti-Insurance” — takes on the “anti-insurance” characterization that follows many DPC conversations. A Medscape commentary directly addressing that framing is its own signal about how common the objection has become.

What This Means

Medscape is not a DPC advocacy publication. It is a physician news and CME site. When it publishes multiple DPC commentaries from the same Chicago physician in 17 days, the signal is that DPC content has a readership worth serving. The model has space in mainstream physician media now — across the full range of conversations physicians are actually having about it.

For physicians considering DPC, the July 31 video is worth watching. It comes from someone who is doing it right now in a city where the counterarguments would be strongest, and it appears in the publication physicians already read for everything else. “The medicine was the easy part” is a sentence that lands differently when you’re reading Medscape between patients than when you’re reading it at a DPC summit.

For practices already in DPC, the pattern tracks what many describe hearing from colleagues: the questions have shifted from the foundational to the operational. Medscape is answering them.

The next DPC piece Medscape publishes will not be a surprise. That’s the measure of how far the model has traveled.