Indiana's State Medical Association Picked a DPC Physician as Its Next President. Its Policy Manual Already Asks for DPC in Medicaid.

Industry News by DPC Insider — Policy Desk
#Indiana#organized medicine#state medical association#Medicaid#HSA#direct primary care
Sources: Dr. Teresa Lovins chosen as next ISMA president · Indiana State Medical Association Public Policy Manual 2025-2026 · Direct Primary Care Is What Medicine Should Be (AAFP Voices) · AAFP Names 2022–2023 Board of Directors · Treasury, IRS provide guidance on new tax benefits for health savings account participants under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill · Indiana — Direct Primary Care Frontier

The Indiana State Medical Association will be run by a direct primary care physician.

Teresa Lovins, a family physician in Columbus, was elected at the ISMA’s 177th annual convention and will become its 180th president, WBIW reported. She serves as president-elect until September 2027, when she succeeds Richard Gunderman, a professor of radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine who was sworn in for the 2026-2027 term the same day.

Lovins owns a membership practice. That matters less as a symbol than for what the ISMA has already put in writing about her model.

Who she is

Lovins has been an ISMA member since 2005. According to WBIW, she has chaired the board of trustees, served as assistant treasurer and sat on the executive committee, the commission on legislation and the association’s American Medical Association delegation. She also helped develop the group’s new strategic plan.

“Dr. Lovins is a lifelong Hoosier and has been serving her hometown Columbus community for over 30 years,” ISMA Executive Vice President Clif Knight, MD, said in the announcement.

Her DPC practice is newer than her ISMA résumé. When the American Academy of Family Physicians named her to its board of directors in 2022, it described her as physician and owner of Lovin My Health DPC, a practice that “opened during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In an April 2025 essay for AAFP Voices, Lovins described what she left behind. She wrote about “rushed patient visits, endless box-checking for ‘quality metrics’” in fee-for-service medicine, and about a group practice owned by the local hospital, where patient quotas came with the ownership. She was “overwhelmed, burned out and wavering on leaving clinical medicine,” she wrote. In DPC, she wrote, “patients pay a reasonable monthly membership to have direct access to their physician.”

So the next ISMA president did the thing many of you might be weighing right now. She left a job at an employee-based wellness clinic and founded her own practice, which she says she started just before the pandemic.

What the ISMA already asks for

The more useful document here is the ISMA’s 2025-2026 Public Policy Manual, which collects the resolutions its House of Delegates has adopted. Four of them name direct primary care.

Resolution 16-41 has three parts. It directs the ISMA to seek a state mechanism letting Medicaid patients use DPC practices. It asks for state law “defining DPC to be outside the scope of state insurance regulation.” And it asks the ISMA to work with the AMA on federal tax code changes so HSAs can be used with DPC and DPC payments count as a “qualified medical expense.”

Resolution 18-13 repeats the HSA ask, this time aimed at the Internal Revenue Code through the AMA.

Resolution 18-14 calls for state legislation “creating a pilot allowing Medicaid patients and/or state employees to use direct primary care (DPC) practices without typical regulation from Medicaid or the state of Indiana, to see if it can reduce state health care spending.”

Resolution 23-69 supports any legislation or regulation letting patients use HSA funds “for direct primary care (DPC) membership or other physician retainer practice fees.”

Count them and the HSA request shows up three times. The Medicaid request shows up twice.

Two asks landed, one is still on the list

The insurance carve-out happened at the state level. Indiana passed SB 303 in 2017, according to DPC Frontier’s Indiana page, placing direct primary care agreements in Title 25 of the Indiana Code and outside insurance regulation.

The HSA ask happened in Washington. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill, “beginning Jan. 1, 2026, an otherwise eligible individual enrolled in certain direct primary care (DPC) service arrangements may contribute to an HSA,” the IRS said in its guidance, and “may use their HSA funds tax-free to pay periodic DPC fees.” The ISMA was one voice among many on that change, and the manual doesn’t claim more.

The Medicaid and state-employee pilot still sits in the 2025-26 manual as a standing directive, in an edition updated in October 2025, and Lovins now inherits it.

The association she inherits will also carry more weight at the AMA. WBIW reported that rising AMA membership among Indiana physicians will grow the state’s AMA delegation to six delegates and six alternates in 2027, the year she takes the ISMA presidency.