Cut Out the Middleman, Keep the Patients: Dr. Chloe Kindred on Building a Direct Primary Care Practice From Zero

Most doctors who complain about their employed job never actually leave. Dr. Chloe Kindred did, with no backup plan the first time and a real one the second.

In this episode of How I Doctor, Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker sits down with Dr. Chloe Kindred, a family physician who spent three years in a hospital-affiliated system in Central Florida before leaving to launch Kindred Family Medicine, a direct primary care practice opening this October. Chloe walks through exactly how an employed job that started out manageable became untenable: a starter panel that tripled within months after three colleagues left in close succession, unpaid hours that crept from thirty minutes early into full weekend mornings, and a request to simply pause new patients that her health system flatly refused.

What follows is a real-time account of building an independent practice from nothing, from pricing a subscription against other DPC practices in the region to picking an EHR and billing platform to the bureaucratic loops of setting up basic infrastructure like prescribing credentials. Along the way, an unscripted Instagram post she made mostly so patients could find her after she left turned into 800,000+ views and a 230-person pre-enrollment waitlist, more than double her original year-one goal.

The conversation closes on why Chloe thinks direct primary care specifically, not just independence broadly, is the model that actually removes the risk she couldn't tolerate: a payer able to unilaterally rewrite the terms of her own work.

What You'll Learn

• What happened when Chloe asked her health system to simply pause new patient intake, and why the answer was no
• The story of her first resignation: submitted with zero plan, rescinded twelve hours later
• What actually convinced her to quit for good, and why it wasn't burnout but a single contract email
• How she's pricing, staffing, and sizing Kindred Family Medicine, and what tools she chose to run it
• Why an unscripted Instagram post now has 800,000+ views, and how it turned into a 230-person waitlist before she saw a single patient
• Chloe's case for direct primary care

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