Hint Health founders, Zak Holdsworth and Graham Melcher, sought solutions to the US healthcare system that would uniformly benefit clinicians and patients. In their research, Zak and Graham saw the need to restore the integrity of primary care, eliminating the insurance fee-for-service infrastructure from routine care delivery and payment, and discovered direct primary care as the best solution. They started their journey by building the operating system for direct primary care (DPC).
Hint introduced education and events to support more doctors and clinicians transition to direct primary care. As the community of DPC practices grew and more data became available via Hint and other entities, it proved the affordability, sustainability, superior health outcomes, and ultimately the value of a DPC membership. The team also noticed the proportion of employer-sponsored memberships growing every year.
Since Hint's vision is to redesign the healthcare system to enable easy access to high quality affordable care and most Americans get healthcare benefits through their employer, the need to drive demand for employer-sponsored DPC memberships became a priority for Hint. However, direct primary care was largely and continues to be fiercely independent and clinician-owned, with most practices having just one or two locations. For large employers who have employees dispersed across the country, finding and contracting with individual DPCs is not feasible.
Beth Holmes, now VP of Hint Connect, joined Hint in the fall of 2019 to bring the DPC offering to more employers and large purchasers. At first, the team at Hint focused on offering Hint software that enabled network affiliation processing to empower employers and brokers to build their own DPC networks according to their needs.
Beth concurrently had several direct conversations with brokers, TPAs, employers and DPCs to better understand the market landscape of offering direct primary care as a benefit in self-insured or other health plans and quickly learned that brokers, TPAs and employers didn’t have the bandwidth nor did they want the responsibility of curating their own DPC network and contracting with DPC practices.
Employers wanted the DPC benefit, but needed it to be a fully vetted solution that was easy to implement. Therefore, to gain any kind of traction with employers and brokers, Hint decided to offer both a technology and services enabled national DPC network solution, partnering with regional DPC networks and adding individual DPC practices across the country to provide a robust footprint of DPC.
Hint launched its very own Direct Primary Care network, Hint Connect, in the fall of 2021 to enable employers to easily implement direct primary care as a benefit and to provide DPC practices with the opportunity to diversify and grow their patient panel with employer-sponsored members. Hint Connect began with a pilot, focused on employers and practices in Texas before strategically rolling out to dozens of states and now covering most states.
While every DPC is unique, employers must provide an equitable benefit across all employees. That’s where Hint Connect comes in to ensure that each DPC practice commits to service standards that Hint Connect sets. Hint Connect also ensures that direct primary care is not a passive benefit for employers, which is why all DPC practices in the network reach out to all new members who join through any given employer sponsor.
Hint Connect offers a standardized DPC benefit to all employers who join, so each enrolled employee engages with a DPC practice that provides:
From the onset to the development and growth of Hint Connect, supporting existing DPC networks via cooperative efforts continues to be a priority. The motivation behind Hint Connect was to offer a national solution for self-insured and larger employer groups to bring the DPC benefit to all of their employees.
On the supply side, Hint worked with established DPC practices and networks, so they could deliver care on their terms, but commit to an offering that worked well for employers. On the demand side, Hint launched the Employer Trends in Direct Primary Care Report in 2023, bringing necessary DPC market education to employer groups and brokers since the concept of direct primary care was new to most.
Alongside the Employer Trends Report, Hint hosts sessions at Hint Summit as well as webinars focused on employers reducing their overall healthcare spend and getting more value with direct primary care (DPC).
Beth Holmes speaking at Hint Summit '23
The growth and success of the direct primary care movement has always been integral to the foundation of Hint Health. The introduction of a network, Hint Connect, is in complete alignment with Hint’s mission to power direct care, and make it the new standard.
By trusting Hint Connect to begin your employees’ benefits journey with DPC, you have a mission-driven partner who is truly committed to helping you achieve affordable, accessible care that positively impacts health outcomes and employee engagement.