About Dr. Sarah Chen

I'm Sarah Chen, a board-certified family medicine physician practicing in the Direct Primary Care model at Verdant Family Medicine, which I founded in January 2025 after eight years in a large health system.

I grew up in a small town where our family doctor, Dr. Reeves, knew everyone by name. He came to our school plays, remembered my brother's Little League stats, and once made a house call when I had bronchitis on a Saturday night. That kind of medicine, personal, unhurried, deeply human, is what drew me to family medicine in the first place. Somewhere between medical school, residency, and eight years of fifteen-minute appointments, I lost touch with that vision. This blog, and this practice, is my attempt to find it again.

I trained at a family medicine residency program that genuinely believed in comprehensive primary care and the doctor-patient relationship. After residency, I joined Meridian Health Partners, a large multi-specialty group, where I practiced for eight years. During that time, my patient panel grew to over 2,400, my appointments shrank to twelve minutes for follow-ups, and I spent more time on documentation and prior authorizations than on patient care. By year seven, I was burning out. By year eight, I was done.

In January 2024, I gave my ninety-day notice and began planning my transition to Direct Primary Care, a model where patients pay a monthly membership fee for comprehensive primary care and the physician doesn't bill insurance. The model allows for smaller patient panels, longer visits, and the kind of accessible, relationship-driven care that I went into medicine to provide.

I started this blog to document every step of the journey: the research, the business planning, the lease hunt, the buildout, the technology decisions, the financial realities, the emotional rollercoaster, and ultimately the deep satisfaction of practicing medicine the way I always wanted to. I write honestly about the hard parts because I think physicians considering this path deserve transparency, not just the highlight reel.

Verdant Family Medicine opened on January 6, 2025, and as of January 2026, we serve 348 patients. I see twelve to fourteen patients a day, spend thirty to forty minutes with each one, and go home by 5:30 most evenings. I am not burned out. I exercise again. I read books for pleasure. I have dinner with my husband James, who is an accountant and who built approximately 90% of the spreadsheets that made this practice possible.

If you're a physician considering DPC, or a patient curious about the model, or just someone who enjoys following someone else's career crisis in real time, I'm glad you're here. Pull up a chair, pour some tea, and stay a while.

Why I Blog

When I was researching DPC, I desperately wanted to find someone who had documented the process honestly and in detail. I found bits and pieces: a podcast episode here, a conference presentation there, a Reddit thread with helpful but incomplete information. I couldn't find the thing I really wanted, which was a start-to-finish narrative from someone who was going through it in real time, sharing the numbers, the decisions, the mistakes, and the feelings.

So I decided to be that person. This blog is the resource I wish I'd had. Every cost is real. Every timeline is accurate. Every emotion is genuine. I hope it helps someone the way it would have helped me.

Contact

If you're a physician with questions about starting a DPC practice, I'm happy to talk. You can reach Verdant Family Medicine through the practice website. If you're a patient interested in DPC membership, visit our practice site for enrollment information.