DPC Patients Scored 89 Percent on a Clinical Quality Measure. The Same Report Cites 84 Percent for Traditional Primary Care.

Analysis by DPC Insider — Research Desk
#patient satisfaction#research#Net Promoter Score#person-centered care#clinical quality#traditional care comparison
Sources: Hint Health 2026 DPC Patient Experience Benchmark Report · Direct Primary Care 2024 Data Brief | AAFP · Direct primary care: Educating patients, building loyalty, and the power of trust | Medical Economics · What patients think about direct primary care | Medical Economics

The Hint Health 2026 DPC Patient Experience Benchmark Report presents two comparison figures against traditional care: an 85 Net Promoter Score against a traditional healthcare range of 38 to 58, and an 89 percent DPC score on the Person-Centered Primary Care Measure against 84 percent for traditional care.

The NPS figure travels further in a conversation. The PCPCM comparison does more analytical work. What the source behind the 84 percent tells you about that comparison is worth examining.

The Survey

The report drew its data from 1,935 patients who initiated surveys across DPC clinics. Of those, 1,632 completed the full survey. Ninety-eight responses were then excluded because they either couldn’t be linked to a specific clinic or came from practices with fewer than 30 respondents, a minimum set by PCPCM validity standards. The final analytical sample was 1,534 patients across 12 clinics in eight states: California, Colorado, Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington.

Surveys ran for 14 months, from June 25, 2024 to August 25, 2025, through clinic-specific survey links sent to each practice’s patient base.

The 30-respondent threshold matters for interpreting who’s in the sample. Clinics with low survey uptake are excluded regardless of age or size. That probably tilts the results toward practices with higher patient engagement, which pushes scores up compared to what a random draw across all DPC practices would produce.

The Domain Breakdown

The 89 percent overall score breaks down unevenly across the four PCPCM domains. These are DPC scores; the report presents no traditional-care domain figures.

Contact and access: DPC scored 97 percent. This is the domain where the DPC model’s structure does the most direct work. AAFP data puts the average DPC patient panel at about 400, and 98 percent of DPC practices offer same-day appointments and phone or text access. Both are harder to maintain at the panel sizes common in fee-for-service primary care.

Comprehensiveness scored 90 percent. This domain measures a whole-person approach that goes beyond the presenting symptoms.

Coordination came in at 88 percent. Continuity, the domain measuring the depth of the patient-physician relationship over time, was the lowest at 82 percent. The 15-point gap between access (97 percent) and continuity (82 percent) is worth noting. DPC’s structural advantages concentrate in first contact and depth per visit. Long-term relationship depth is harder for a small practice to build at the same pace, and the scores reflect that.

The Open Question

The 5-point difference between 89 and 84 appears in the same report, and the source behind the 84 percent is documented. The phrase “84% for traditional care” on page 12 of the report carries an embedded hyperlink to Mills et al. (JABFM 2025), a study that applied the same 11-item PCPCM to 21,154 patients across 78 conventional primary care practices at Jefferson Health, a large nonprofit health system, between April 2023 and January 2024. Since both studies used the same instrument, the comparison is not between unlike measures.

What the two studies don’t share is population, recruitment, or response rate. The Mills study distributed surveys to 329,450 empaneled patients and received 21,154 completed responses, a 6.4 percent response rate. The Hint study distributed clinic-specific surveys to each practice’s patient base and achieved an 84 percent completion rate. The two samples were measured at different times and almost certainly differ in health complexity, demographics, and engagement with primary care.

Survey respondents in the Hint study are patients on each clinic’s distribution list. Those who enrolled in DPC and left before the survey window opened were unlikely to have received it. That selection effect probably pushes DPC scores up relative to any comparison drawn from a broader population.

The 97 percent contact and access score is the most structurally defensible number in the report, because it reflects a feature of the model that doesn’t depend much on who responded. If a practice has 400 patients and offers same-day appointments, the access score follows from that.

The 82 percent continuity score is the one that most warrants continued attention. A 2018 systematic review in BMJ Open found that patients with greater continuity of care had lower rates of mortality. The DPC model’s approach to continuity is the depth of the physician-patient relationship over time. Whether that holds equally well for patients managing complex conditions over many years is a question this survey’s design can’t resolve.

A prospective study enrolling patients into DPC and conventional practices simultaneously, applying the PCPCM at baseline and follow-up, and controlling for health status and demographics would give this comparison the analytical foundation it currently lacks.