Initial Decisions

Pick a business name for your practice

Note that your legal business name doesn't have to be related whatsoever to your public-facing marketing name! Choose a business name quickly and don't drag your feet. You want to incorporate as fast as possible so you can start engaging with vendors as a legal entity.

Google around for your state's online tool for checking name availability.

Pick a marketing name for your practice

If you're very well known in the community, you may want to include your name in the practice name for marketing reasons. If you plan to hire additional physicians or take on partners at some point, you probably don't. Click around on the DPC Frontier Mapper for ideas.

Some other considerations: make sure there are memorable social media usernames/handles available. Use a service like namecheckr.com to check availability for a name across all social media sites at once. You'll also want to make sure a decent domain name is available. Use Google Domains to check availability.

Decide on your business hours

Consider whether to have posted business hours at all. - if you only intend to be available on request, you may not want to commit to a pre-specified workday (though if you intend to have front-office staff, you probably should for their sake).

Decide whether to give your practice a specialist "flavor"

Some DPC practices have a bent towards a particular specialty/population, including pediatrics, geriatrics, sports medicine, PT, addiction medicine, pain management, endocrinology, wellness/nutrition, and more. Consider doing something similar if you're more specialized.

Decide whether to run a "pure" or "hybrid" practice

There are many shades of "purity" among DPC practices.

Some hybrid practices still accept insurance from a subset of their patients, or for certain non-included procedures. This is common for practices that are transitioning from a traditional practice to DPC. This discussion is laid out in more detail by DPC Frontier here. Also note that billing any insurance company unquestionably makes you a “covered entity” under HIPAA. A pure DPC practice may not be.

It is technically possible to run a DPC practice AND bill Medicare for certain procedures, if the benefits of practice membership explicity include only "non-covered services" (listed here), though that is highly restrictive. See DPC Frontier's analysis here.

Also note that billing any insurance company unquestionably makes you a “covered entity” under HIPAA. A pure DPC practice may not be.