Since publishing the DPC Trends Report last year, we’ve fielded many questions about how we came to our estimate for the number of DPC patients enrolled across America. You may recall the chart below as it was reported last October in our first data dump of its kind.

dpc-people-enrolled-estimated-dpc-patients-per-capita

Not only does this chart demonstrate how DPC is growing, it also reveals a compounding, almost exponential growth trend. When looking at the data behind this chart below, we see this is driven by two factors that have both seen a steady increase:

  • The number of DPC practices
  • The average panel size of each practice

dpc-people-enrolled-frontier-and-hint-data

 

Number of DPC Practices

The calculation begins with an estimate of the number of DPC practices across each year in our study. While no complete census of the industry exists, it’s difficult to beat the dedication and scrutiny which Dr. Phil Eskew puts into the DPC Mapper found at DPC Frontier.com.

Phil regularly scours the internet in search of new DPC practices to add to his registry, in addition to the hundreds of practices already emailing him directly to be added to this highly prominent list. These dynamics combined make DPC Mapper a strong approximation for a complete census, and when I approached Phil to discuss this project I was delighted to learn he had been rigorously tracking this metric since 2014.

Average Panel Size

Our Data Science team then consulted Hint's internal data to calculate the average panel size across all Hint powered DPC practices for each of these years.

Final Calculation

Putting it all together, the per capita estimate of Americans enrolled in DPC was calculated as the product of the number of practices and the average panel size, divided by yearly population:

dpc-people-enrolled-equation

As you can see, a steady increase in both the number and size of DPC practices leads to the strong per capita growth we see in DPC over the past four years.

Conclusion

Hint is proud to support the growth of Direct Care nationwide by streamlining complex administration workflows in rapidly growing practices. We’re even more excited to leveraging our unique position and provide insights that can inform and accelerate Direct Care strategies across the country.

For more information on how you should be leveraging this data in your practice, please contact one of our Direct Care experts at DirectCare@hint.com

 

Footnote: This estimate is expected to be conservative, as there are many outliers in Hint’s data set that are well above average panel size reported here.
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