A New Buyer Says It Wants Direct Primary Care Practices. The Two It Started With Are Concierge, Financed With $17.1 Million in Debt.

Ask a direct primary care physician what their practice would sell for and you might get a shrug instead of a number. A group of concierge doctors in Indianapolis wants to supply one. This week they launched the company meant to do the buying, on financing OakNorth put on the record back in June.

LegacyMD, LLC launched September 3 as what it calls a majority physician-owned platform for concierge and direct primary care practices. It opens with two groups combined into one company: Priority Physicians of greater Indianapolis and HealthBridge Personalized Medicine of Long Island. Together they will run 21 physicians across four locations by the end of 2026, with new flagship offices going up in Fishers, Indiana, and Lake Success, New York.

The debt financing came from OakNorth, which confirmed $17.1 million in loans and committed facilities to fund the HealthBridge acquisition and the platform’s formation.

The Pitch Is Aimed at Founders Who Do Not Want a Financial Buyer

Matthew Priddy, MD, who co-founded Priority Physicians in 2002 and now serves as CEO of LegacyMD, framed the whole thing around one problem. “Many concierge practice owners feel they can’t sell without ‘selling out,’” he said in the announcement. “We built LegacyMD so the physicians who put their life’s work into their practices can keep more ownership, keep more autonomy, and keep more of the upside.”

The structure follows from that. LegacyMD says it is majority owned by its physicians and employees, that it offers equity to employed doctors as part of every transaction, and that each practice keeps its own brand, care model, clinical decision-making and local leadership. Centralized support covers HR, IT, finance and growth. Governance runs through a Physicians’ Council made up of practice presidents, chaired by Priddy.

The company’s own site puts the intent plainly: the value created through partnership “should primarily benefit physicians rather than outside financial sponsors.”

That is a direct shot at the model DPC and concierge physicians have watched roll through the rest of primary care. Priddy’s pitch is aimed at owners who assume the only exit on offer costs them ownership, autonomy and upside all at once.

The Two Practices It Started With Are Not Quite What “Concierge” Usually Means

Priority Physicians opened in 2002 and was Indiana’s first concierge medical group. Its own FAQ says something that complicates the label. “No. We do not directly bill your insurance for any of our clinical services,” the practice states. Patients still need coverage for labs, imaging, pharmaceuticals and outside specialists, but the clinical relationship itself runs on the membership fee.

DPC practices work the same way at the visit. The overlap stops short of being identical, though. The AAFP describes a DPC membership fee as covering clinical and laboratory services both, and Priority Physicians leaves labs to a patient’s coverage. Partial overlap is still enough that LegacyMD naming DPC as a target market is not a stretch on its face.

HealthBridge, founded in 2001 by David Edelson, MD, works similarly at the membership level. Its FAQ says insurance “can still be used for labs, imaging, and specialist visits.”

Neither practice publishes a price. Priority Physicians says only that its “fee schedule is graduated based upon the age demographics of our members.” HealthBridge describes an annual membership fee without naming a number. For a platform now inviting other owners to the table, the absence of public pricing on both anchor practices is a gap a prospective seller would notice.

The $17.1 Million Is Debt, Not Equity

The press release describes capital from “committed financing partners and long-term oriented family offices” and says LegacyMD is “built for long-term compounding rather than a resale.”

Read the OakNorth side and the picture sharpens. The $17.1 million is debt, made up of loans and other committed facilities rather than a single instrument. Connor Bieling, OakNorth’s director of debt finance, said backing “entrepreneur-led businesses through transformational acquisitions like this is exactly the type of transaction we’re looking to back.” Debt gets serviced out of practice cash flow, on a schedule, whether or not the compounding thesis works out.

None of that makes the structure worse than a private equity buyout. The difference sits in who holds the equity. A physician-majority cap table changes who decides and who profits, while the debt obligation stays exactly where it was, and neither the announcement nor the company site says what happens when the family offices want liquidity.

Whether the DPC Half Is Real Comes Down to Panel Math

The two models stop overlapping at the panel. Priority Physicians caps its doctor-to-patient ratio at 1:250. The AAFP reports an average DPC panel of 413 patients, drawn from the 2024 direct primary care data brief, and monthly DPC membership fees that generally run from $50 to $100. Fees vary from practice to practice.

A practice built on 250 patients paying concierge rates and a practice built on 413 paying DPC rates produce revenue in different ways, carry different staffing, and get valued on different multiples. A buyer whose operating experience is the first one is going to need a second set of assumptions for the second. That second set appears nowhere in the announcement or on the company site.

The gap matters because DPC owners are the ones LegacyMD has not bought from yet. Both anchor practices are concierge. Priority Physicians caps its panel well below the DPC average. HealthBridge’s FAQ describes concierge doctors generally as limiting their patient load, and publishes no number of its own. The DPC line in the announcement is a stated intention with no transaction behind it, and a stated intention is not a price.

What To Watch

Three signals, in order of how much they would tell you.

The first is a named DPC acquisition. LegacyMD says it is actively seeking partnership conversations with membership-based practices nationwide. A deal with an actual DPC practice, on disclosed terms, would convert the DPC line in the announcement into evidence. Two concierge groups do not.

The second is whether the equity terms ever get published. “Opportunities for equity ownership” appears in the release without a percentage, a vesting schedule or a valuation method. Any physician weighing an offer will need all three, and how freely LegacyMD shares them will say a lot about the alignment it is claiming.

The third is what happens at the four locations by December. New offices in Fishers and Lake Success are capital projects with dates attached, funded by the same facility that funded the acquisition. Whether they open on time is the cleanest early read on whether this platform is running ahead of its financing or behind it.