Private equity in direct primary care is winning

The independent medicine community celebrated when the numbers dropped. Eighty-three percent growth in practice sites. Seventy-eight percent more clinicians. Conference decks updated overnight. Nobody asked who owns them now.

The Health Affairs data is real. The growth is real. What the numbers do not show is ownership. And ownership is where the story changes.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Charlesbank Capital Partners, Blue Sea Capital, Shore Capital Partners, and Revelstoke Capital Partners all hold direct equity positions in concierge or DPC platforms. Revelstoke completed its first concierge acquisition in September 2025. Goldman Sachs and Charlesbank are entering year five of their MDVIP hold. These are not observers. They are builders.

In DPC, the story is the same. Frontier Direct Care raised a $20 million Series B. Marathon Health operates more than 750 health centers serving over 3 million covered lives. Premise and Crossover merged in January 2026 to create a platform with nearly 900 wellness centers across more than 400 employers. Private equity identified the employer DPC opportunity before most independent DPC physicians knew they were competing for it.

The reason is straightforward. Recurring cash-pay revenue is the financial profile private equity finds most attractive outside of software companies. The physician who built her practice around the physician-patient relationship and the firm that acquired it are not operating under the same incentives. Only one of them is accountable to the patient.

Now the model is being replicated without the physician. CornerHealth raised $7.39 million in April 2025 to build a platform that funds and supports nurse practitioners launching independent primary care practices. The company positions itself as the antidote to corporate medicine. The irony is not subtle. Venture capital is funding an “independent medicine” platform built around midlevels, marketed with the same language physicians used to describe what they were building when they left the system.

This is not an argument about scope of practice. It is an argument about what happens when the brand of independent medicine gets separated from the structure that made it meaningful. DPC physicians who built these practices for autonomy and time with patients are already naming it. Some call it DPC in name only. The infrastructure arrives. The membership fee stays. The physician does not.

MDVIP is the counterpoint the community reaches for. PE-backed since 2014, it reports 97 percent patient satisfaction, renewal rates above 90 percent. That record is real. But MDVIP is a network affiliation model. The physician retains his or her practice, panel, and clinical autonomy. PE owns the brand and the infrastructure layered on top. That is a different structure than a firm acquiring the practice itself. What changes at exit determines everything, and MDVIP has not exited yet.

This is not an argument against capital. A physician who spent a decade building a practice has earned the right to consider her options. Liquidity is legitimate. The question is not whether to take the meeting. The question is what he or she is agreeing to when the term sheet is signed, and whether the model that attracted the investor survives the transaction.

Concierge medicine was built on a specific covenant. Smaller panels. Genuine access. A physician who knows your history before you say a word. DPC was built on the same foundation, with a different price point and a different payer structure. Both positioned themselves as the antidote to what volume-based, administratively driven medicine had become.

What private equity brings is pressure to perform at scale. In adjacent health care sectors, that has meant standardized visit structures, expanded panel sizes, and contracts that prioritize employer volume over individual patient relationships. The practices that protected against those pressures did so before the deal closed, not after.

Independent ownership in concierge and DPC fell from roughly 84 percent to 60 percent between 2018 and 2023. Corporate-affiliated practices grew by 576 percent in the same period. That data has been published. It has been cited. The community has acknowledged the trend. It has not acted on it.

The growth number is real. It does not tell you what was preserved inside the growth. It does not tell you whether the physician still calls you back, whether the panel is still capped, or whether the model that justified the membership fee still exists underneath the ownership structure that replaced it.

You called it growth. Private equity called it opportunity. The practices that understand the difference are making ownership decisions now, while they still control the outcome.

This essay is cited in the KevinMD record on private equity and corporate medicine.

Dana Y. Lujan is a health care strategist and operator with more than twenty years of experience across payers, providers, and health systems. She is the founder of Wellthlinks, a consulting firm that helps employers and providers redesign care models through concierge and direct primary care, and author of The CEO Physician: Strategic Blueprint for Independent Medicine. Dana has led multi-state network development, payer contracting, financial modeling, and compliance initiatives that strengthen provider sustainability and employer value. She previously served as president of the Nevada chapter of HFMA and is pursuing a JD to expand her expertise in health care law and compliance. She has been featured in Authority Magazine and publishes on KevinMD, MedCity News, and  Medium, where she writes on health care innovation, direct primary care, concierge medicine, employer contracting, and compliance. She has forthcoming BenefitsPRO. Additional professional updates can be found on LinkedIn and Instagram.