A practice you own. Built alongside the job you have.
What changed in medicine, the two ways to practice it, what your members are actually buying, where to start, and the tools that already exist to run it.
The work didn't change. Who controls it did.
Over the last decade, corporations and private-equity roll-ups bought up independent practices. The doctor who used to own the practice became an employee inside it — handed a patient panel too large to know, a schedule set by someone else, and productivity targets that reward volume over care.
You didn't lose your judgment or your skill. You lost the room to use them. Prior authorizations, RVU quotas, a chart that takes longer than the visit, and a compensation model tied to throughput rather than outcomes. The relationship that drew you to medicine — knowing a patient over time — is the first thing the model squeezes out.
Two ways to practice the same medicine.
Concierge medicine keeps everything you trained for and changes what surrounds it: your panel size, your calendar, and who the practice answers to.
Traditional insurance-based practice
- × A panel of about 1,900 patients you can't really know
- × 15-minute visits, dictated by the schedule
- × RVU targets — you're measured in volume
- × Someone else sets your pay, protocols, and hours
- × Documentation and prior-auth after the kids are asleep
- × The upside of growth goes to the owner, not to you
- × Loss of autonomy over how you practice
- × A challenged quality of life — for you and for your family
- × Sells on what you billed last year, like every other practice on the street
Physician-controlled, membership-based
- ✓ A right-sized panel — roughly 300–600 patients
- ✓ Visits that take the time the patient needs
- ✓ Revenue from membership, not volume quotas
- ✓ You set the schedule, the model, and the terms
- ✓ Far less overhead spent chasing insurance
- ✓ You own the practice — and its growth
- ✓ Recurring revenue — the kind of asset buyers pay a premium for
That question got a page of its own.
Ask most physicians what their practice is worth and they have never run the numbers. It is the question a CPA is built for, and it does not fit in a paragraph — so what it costs to leave, what the practice earns and spends once it is running, and what it is worth when you are finished with it now live together on one page.
Four things you get back.
Autonomy
You own the practice and the decisions inside it — the model, the panel, the schedule, the standard of care.
Time
Fewer patients, real visits. The time to think, to listen, and to practice the medicine you trained for.
Income you control
A predictable membership base instead of the insurance treadmill — and the upside of the practice is yours.
The relationship
Knowing your patients again — continuity, trust, and the reason most of us went into medicine in the first place.
Leaving is a decision. This is the path.
Most physicians don't stay because they love the model — they stay because the switch feels unknowable. It isn't. It's a sequence, and it's been walked before.
See the numbers
Model your panel, your membership revenue, your overhead, and the runway you'd need — before you commit to anything.
Plan the switch
Timing, your patients, your contract and non-compete, and the concierge or direct-care model that fits your specialty.
Structure it right
Entity, agreements, compliance, billing, and tax — the business scaffolding, handled with the right professionals.
Open your doors
Launch the practice that's yours, with the systems to run it lean and the support to keep it steady.
The real advantage was never an app. It's a doctor who cares for the whole family.
Apps and telemedicine platforms handle access — and they handle it well. What no app can do is the thing a concierge physician does naturally: know the whole family, not just the patient in the bed. When one trusted doctor looks after the parents, the kids, and the grandparent down the hall in a facility, care stops being a string of disconnected visits and becomes something a family can actually feel.
Treat the family, not the chart
A concierge panel is small enough that one physician can truly know an entire family — and catch the problems of an aging parent that a fifteen-minute visit never would.
Proactive by training
Part of how we help you build the practice is a posture the system trains out of doctors: reach out first — especially for the ones who can't always advocate for themselves.
Nobody gets forgotten
A parent in a facility should never feel out of sight. A shared photo, a two-minute call, a hello passed along — connection, even when the family can't be in the room.
Tools that already exist
You don't need us to invent anything. Plenty of trusted apps already keep families in touch — we help you fold that into the care you give, and we widen what we recommend as we vet more.
A wave from a grandfather in his room, reaching his family at dinner that night — and their hello coming back.
Nobody has to invent that moment. It only has to be encouraged — by a doctor who knows the whole family and the everyday tools that already connect them. That's what a concierge practice makes room for, and it costs nothing to add.
They keep their doctor. They keep their insurance. What they don't have is access.
Your members are not leaving their primary care physician, and they are not dropping their health plan. This does not replace either one — and we say so plainly, because it is true.
What they are buying is the one thing insurance does not sell: a doctor who answers. Someone who already knows their history and will take the call. Someone who will give them a second opinion on what they have just been told. Someone who will tell them about the things their plan will not pay for — because those things exist, and nobody inside a fifteen-minute visit has the time to mention them.
That is why the panel stays small and the fee is monthly. They are not paying you for visits. They are paying to be known.
It is worth knowing what the current arrangement values that relationship at. Of everything spent on an insured family in a year, roughly four percent goes to primary care — on the order of $295 a year for a commercially insured adult, and closer to $580 a year under Medicare. That is what the system pays a physician to carry someone’s primary care for twelve months. Your members are not being asked to replace it. They are paying separately, and directly, for the part it does not include.
Primary care’s share of spending: Health Care Cost Institute (2022 data, published 2024). Per-person figures are that share applied to average annual spending and are illustrative.
Two doctors, two different starts.
If you are employed now. Go slowly and keep the job. Start remotely, on the hours you choose, and let the practice tell you how fast it wants to grow. If you also want to see people in person, rent a few sessions a week in another physician's office rather than signing a lease of your own. None of this has to happen in one move.
If you already own a practice. You are the special case. Adding a concierge membership alongside the insurance work — a hybrid — is a reasonable thing to do when the practice already exists and the patients are already yours. It is not where we would tell anybody else to begin, and we will tell you so.
There is no program to choose from here, and no tier to be sorted into. We talk, you say what you actually want, and the thing gets built around that. Sometimes the honest answer at the end of a phone call is that this is not a fit — and you will hear that from us rather than a follow-up sequence.
There is no right or wrong answer here.
It is a question of how you want to practice medicine, how you want the practice to grow, and what kind of life you want for yourself and your family. Those answers are yours to give, not ours.
You don't have to wait for anybody to build you something. It already exists.
A telemedicine concierge practice needs four things working together: a way for patients to reach you, a way to see them on video, a medical record that holds the visit, and a way to collect the membership every month. Below are four platforms that do all of that today — real companies, real products, in daily use by independent practices, each one signing a Business Associate Agreement. You could open on any of them this quarter.
We publish the prices. Every figure here comes from the company's own pricing page, checked in August 2026, including the add-ons that don't appear in the headline number. Nobody on this page pays us anything, and we don't take a referral fee from any of them.
Healthie
HIPAA · BAAThe least expensive real all-in-one.
$49–$129 per month
Charting, video visits, secure messaging, patient portal, scheduling and card payments in a single login. Built for virtual-first practices, which is exactly what you would be starting.
- Essentials $49/mo up to 250 active patients; Plus $129/mo unlimited; about 10% less paid annually
- Charting, one-to-one video telehealth, secure messaging, patient portal and mobile app on every tier
- Card payments through Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30
- Adding clinicians runs about $50/mo each on the group tier
Best fit: a solo physician who wants one login and the lowest monthly cost to open the doors.
Hint Health
HIPAA · BAABuilt around the membership itself.
from $290 per month
The only one here designed around the thing that actually makes concierge work — recurring membership billing — with a clinical record, member onboarding and self-scheduling built around it.
- Launch $290/mo — one clinician, unlimited members; each additional clinician +$290/mo
- Clinical EMR, membership management, member onboarding, self-scheduling, automated recurring billing
- Cards 3.00% + $0.30; ACH 1.00% + $0.25, capped at $5. The Pro tier lowers both
- Free until you launch — nothing charged before the practice opens
Best fit: the physician who wants the money side handled properly from the first member.
Cerbo
HIPAA · BAAThe concierge-native clinical record.
$281 per month, plus setup
Built by MD HQ specifically for direct-care and concierge practices, and the deepest clinical tool on this list. Read the add-ons before you compare it to the others on headline price.
- $281/mo full-time prescribing doctor ($174 part-time); staff seats from $63/mo
- Setup $1,195 — or $595 for a practice under six months old with fewer than 30 patients
- Charting and portal messaging included. Patient portal +$79/mo. Video +$27/mo. AI scribe from $29/mo
- eRx, EPCS and e-fax for prescribing doctors; 250 outbound fax pages a month included
Best fit: a physician who wants the strongest clinical record and will pay for it. Add the portal and video and the real figure is nearer $390 a month.
Atlas.md
HIPAA · BAAFlat, unlimited, written by a practising doctor.
$300 per doctor, per month
Built by the founder of AtlasMD for his own direct-care practice. One flat price, unlimited patients, with billing and dispensing designed in rather than bolted on afterwards.
- $300/mo per registered doctor, unlimited patients, no published setup fee
- Texts, phone calls and faxes fold into the chart; e-prescribing and in-house dispensing
- Billing built in with no third-party platform — cards 2.1% + $0.30, bank transfers $0.25
- The lowest card-processing rate of the four, which matters more than it looks
Watch this one: video visits are not in the published feature list. For a telemedicine practice you would pair it with a video tool.
If all you need this month is the conversation. You can start smaller than any of the above. Spruce Health is $24 per user per month for HIPAA-covered phone, text, video, fax and a shared inbox, with the BAA included and a one-time $19.50 SMS registration; the $49 tier adds call routing and after-hours triage. Doximity Dialer is free for verified physicians and gives you calls and browser-based video showing your practice number instead of your cell. Neither is a medical record — you would add one of the four above when you are ready. Plenty of physicians begin exactly here.
The software is the small line. Watch the processing fee.
This is the CPA talking, and it is the one piece of arithmetic on this page I would not want you to skip. Software runs somewhere between $50 and $400 a month, and it stops there. Payment processing does not stop — it grows with every member you add.
Take the suggested $200 monthly membership. A 3% card rate costs you $6 of it, every month, for as long as that patient stays. At three hundred members that is roughly $1,800 a month, which is more than any platform fee on this page — several of them put together. The same payment taken by bank transfer, on a plan that charges 1% capped at $5, costs a fraction of that.
So ask every vendor one question before you sign: what does it cost me when a member pays by bank transfer rather than card, and can I make that the default? It is a dull question. Over a few hundred members and a few years it is worth more than most of the features you will be shown in the demo.
An illustration using the suggested membership price, not a projection of your revenue, your panel, or your costs. Processing rates vary by plan, by card type and by negotiation.
And eventually, ours — but we are not going to put a date on it.
We are building our own, designed around this practice specifically. It could be three months. It could be three years. You can never tell. So until it exists, this page is the honest answer: these are real products you can buy today, and any of them will let you open. When ours is ready, you will hear it from us. Until then we would rather you started than waited.
These are independent, third-party companies, described from their own published materials and pricing pages as checked in August 2026 — not endorsements or paid placements. We are not affiliated with any of them, we receive no commission or referral fee from any of them, and none of them has any relationship with us. Software pricing, feature sets and Business Associate Agreement terms change frequently and often are not what a headline number suggests; confirm current pricing, the current BAA, and what is included versus billed as an add-on directly with the vendor before you rely on any of it. Our role is to help you compare and set up the right fit for how you want to practise.
The other thing that already exists is people who will do it for you.
Software is only half of what is available today. The other half is firms — some that will convert your whole practice and bring you members, others that will simply run the marketing while you keep everything. You don't have to do this with us. Here are the main players, shown honestly, with what they charge where they publish it.
Turnkey conversion partners
They convert your practice and market it to bring members — a hands-off path where an established firm handles the switch and the patient acquisition for you. These are independent companies, listed for comparison.
MDVIP
Conversion partnerFranchise / revenue share
The largest membership-primary-care network — reported 1,400+ affiliated physicians across about 45 states. Handles the conversion, national and local marketing, and member acquisition; panels are capped around 600.
Pricing: partnership model; MDVIP shares in membership revenue. Patient fee reported ~$1,800–$5,000/yr by market. Visit →
SignatureMD
Conversion partnerRoyalty share
Helps independent physicians add a membership tier while continuing to bill insurance. Provides marketing, technology, and training to launch and grow the panel.
Pricing: takes a royalty share of membership revenue; patient fee ~$1,500–$2,000/yr. Visit →
Specialdocs Consultants
Conversion partnerCustom engagement
Practice-management consultants offering a turnkey conversion playbook plus ongoing operational and marketing support for independent physicians going membership-based.
Pricing: custom per-physician engagement; not published. Visit →
Castle Connolly Private Health Partners
Conversion partnerCustom engagement
Positions itself as a physician-equity conversion specialist — you own and build equity in a concierge practice, with launch support and marketing.
Pricing: custom per-physician engagement; not published. Visit →
Hire an established marketing firm
Unlike the turnkey partners above, these firms don't convert or take a share of your practice — you keep and own it, and they run the marketing for a fee. A straightforward snapshot of agencies operating in this space today; pricing is shown where a company publishes it.
Healthcare Success
Marketing agencyCustom proposal
Full-service concierge and membership-medicine marketing: brand strategy, web design, SEO, paid media, content, and analytics.
Pricing: custom — request a proposal. Visit →
PatientGain
Marketing agencyFrom ~$999 / month
Digital marketing for DPC and concierge practices: AI-driven patient engagement, local SEO, Google and Facebook advertising, reputation management, and texting/chat tools.
Pricing: advertised from ~$999/month; tiered. Visit →
Direction.com
Marketing agencyCustom
Concierge-focused SEO, PPC, AI-search visibility, and website design; reporting built around consultation requests and enrollments rather than just clicks.
Pricing: custom — book a consultation. Visit →
Hint Health
Platform + marketingCustom
A DPC platform — membership billing and EHR — paired with DPC-specific marketing services to help practices grow their membership.
Pricing: custom — contact for a quote. Visit →
These are independent, third-party companies, listed for comparison from their own public materials — not endorsements, and we are not affiliated with any of them. Pricing shown is what the company advertises or what public sources report, and it varies widely by market, specialty, and package; confirm current pricing, terms, and business-model details directly with each company before relying on them.