There's No List of Concierge Doctors. Here's How to Find Them Anyway.

If your company makes a diagnostic, device or wellness offering that Medicare and most commercial plans don't cover, you already know the commercial problem.

Your product may be clinically meaningful: earlier detection, deeper risk insight, a longevity or prevention tool. But without reimbursement, its natural buyer is the cash-pay patient.

Reaching that patient directly is slow and expensive. Consumer acquisition costs add up quickly, and a new diagnostic rarely earns trust from an ad alone. The more efficient path usually runs through a physician who already treats cash-pay patients and can recommend your product at the right moment.

For many self-pay products, that physician is the concierge doctor.

Why concierge physicians are the natural channel

Concierge and direct primary care (DPC) practices run on a different model from most of American primary care. Patients pay a membership or retainer fee for more time, more access and a relationship built on prevention rather than episodic sick visits. 

That produces three conditions a self-pay product needs:

• Patients who already pay out of pocket. An uncovered test is a normal conversation in these practices, not an awkward one.
• Time to discuss it. A longer visit leaves room to talk about early detection or long-term health planning.
• A prevention mindset. These practices attract patients who want to get ahead of disease, which is exactly where early-detection and longevity products fit.

Concierge physicians still follow the standard of care. What their model adds is the time and the patient base to go beyond the minimum.

So the question diagnostic and medtech marketers keep bringing us is simple: can we reach concierge doctors specifically?

The catch: there's no concierge checkbox

Every practicing physician in the US has a National Provider Identifier (NPI), and the federal NPI registry records specialty, practice location and credentials. It does not record business model.

No field says "concierge," and no public dataset provides a verified national list.

So we had to infer the audience from signals in the data that is available. Some signals turned out strong, some turned out weak, and one idea didn't hold up at all. Here's what we found.

Signal 1: The practice name (useful, but incomplete)

Some practices say what they are in their business name: "Concierge," "Direct Primary Care," "Personal Physicians." 

We searched the registry for organizations using those terms and matched them to physicians practicing at the same address. That found about 800 physicians at roughly 260 practice locations. It was a start, but it had two limitations. 

It was noisy, because shared medical office buildings pulled in unrelated doctors. It also missed most of the market, because many concierge physicians practice under their own name. 

A name search can't find a doctor whose sign just says "Jane Smith, MD."

Even so, those matches gave us a small known group of concierge practices to test other signals against.

A hunch that didn't hold: the NP/PA-heavy practice

We suspected these practices to rely heavily on nurse practitioners and physician assistants, with a physician stepping in for complex cases. 

The data showed the opposite. At the matched concierge practices, there were about 0.6 NPs or PAs per physician, and at DPC practices about 0.9.

On reflection, that makes sense. Concierge patients pay for direct, unhurried access to their doctor. For a marketer, the implication is clear: the physician is the right primary target.

Signal 2: Medicare opt-out (the strongest signal we found)

CMS publishes a list of physicians who have formally opted out of Medicare, meaning they contract privately with Medicare-age patients instead of billing Medicare. Opting out doesn't remove a physician's NPI, so these doctors are still fully identifiable and targetable.

In the current data, 4,559 active primary care physicians are opted out of Medicare, about 1.35% of all active primary care physicians. Among physicians at the known concierge and DPC practices, 22% were opted out, roughly 16 times the baseline rate. That's strong evidence the opt-out list is finding the right kind of practice.

The signal isn't pure. Opting out also captures other cash-pay models, such as functional and integrative medicine and cash-pay telehealth. For a self-pay product, those physicians are usually still a good fit, since their patients already pay out of pocket. 

The bigger limitation is that many retainer-style concierge doctors stay enrolled in Medicare, so this signal leans toward DPC and misses part of the concierge market.

A signal we expected that didn't show up: small patient panels

Concierge doctors care for far fewer patients than a typical primary care physician, so we expected them to show smaller Medicare patient counts. 

To test this, we compared the known concierge physicians with all other family and internal medicine physicians using CMS's 2024 Medicare Part B data

That gave us a behavioral lookalike. Physicians whose Medicare patients look like concierge patients, meaning very few dual-eligible patients and high per-patient intensity, are 3.5 to 7 times more likely to be at a known concierge practice than the average primary care doctor. 

This rule doesn't prove a doctor runs a concierge practice. It finds practices that resemble one, which is what an expansion audience should do. Because the known group is small, we treat these ratios as directional, not precise.

Signal 3: Geography

Concierge practices cluster where patients can afford membership fees. Family and internal medicine physicians in ZIP codes with a median household income of $150,000 or more add up to about 6,173. 

This is the broadest and least specific signal. It works best as a supporting layer, not as a stand-alone audience.

The obvious source we left alone

The major concierge networks publish physician finders. They would be the most precise source available, but their terms of use don't allow commercial use of their listings, so we didn't use them. 

Building a healthcare audience responsibly includes respecting where the data comes from. If a client has a direct relationship with a network, that could change things.

What the audience looks like

Putting the signals together produces a tiered audience instead of a single list:

Segments overlap and aren't additive.

The core audience is concentrated in California, Florida, Texas, New York, Colorado, Washington, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois.

Why a focused audience is an advantage

A few thousand well-chosen physicians is the right size for a self-pay product. With a smaller, well-defined audience, every impression lands on a physician who plausibly fits, instead of being spread across hundreds of thousands of doctors who will never recommend an uncovered test.

A focused audience still needs continuous refinement, and that's how our PrioritySignal™ approach works:

1. Priority Audience. Launch the core and the focused lookalike as separate segments, so you can see each signal's performance on its own instead of blending them together.
2. Provider Engagement. Provider-level reporting shows, by NPI and name, which individual physicians received your message and which engaged with it, without depending on form fills that physicians rarely complete.
3. Provider Intelligence. Compare engagement across segments. If opted-out physicians engage at a higher rate than the lookalike, or the reverse, that tells you where to put the next dollar, and it tests the audience model against real behavior.
4. Commercial Activation. Shift budget toward the segments that respond, expand into the broader lookalike once the core is performing, retarget engaged physicians with deeper content like a product explainer video, and give your commercial team a named list of physicians who have shown interest to prioritize.

The audience isn't fixed at launch. It improves as the signals come in.

The takeaway

No one publishes a list of concierge physicians, and the data didn't back every idea we tested.

But the signals that held up, particularly Medicare opt-out status and a concierge-like Medicare patient mix, point to an audience that is specific, reachable and well matched to self-pay diagnostics and wellness products.

If your product depends on the cash-pay patient, the physicians who already serve that patient are identifiable, and you can learn which of them are paying attention.

Discuss your HCP strategy →

Methodology: Active individual NPIs from the August 2026 NPPES release. Primary care includes family medicine, internal medicine, geriatric medicine and general practice; pediatrics excluded. Medicare opt-out status from CMS's public opt-out list. Utilization comparisons use CMS 2024 Medicare Part B provider data for office-based family and internal medicine physicians. Income data from US Census estimates.

Q&A: There’s No List of Concierge Doctors

Why can't concierge doctors just be pulled from the NPI registry?

The NPI registry captures specialty, credentials and practice location. No field distinguishes a concierge or direct primary care (DPC) physician from any other family or internal medicine doctor.

What's the strongest signal for identifying a concierge physician?

Physicians who formally opt out contract privately instead of billing Medicare, and they keep their NPI, so they stay fully identifiable. Only about 1.35% of active primary care physicians are opted out nationally, but 22% of physicians at known concierge and DPC practices are, roughly 16 times the baseline rate.

Does Medicare opt-out status only capture concierge doctors?

No, it also picks up other cash-pay models like functional medicine, integrative medicine and cash-pay telehealth. For a self-pay product that's generally still a good fit, since those patients already pay out of pocket.

What about the idea that concierge practices lean on NPs and PAs?

Matched concierge and DPC practices actually had fewer NPs and PAs per physician than expected. It makes sense in hindsight: concierge patients are paying specifically for direct access to their own doctor, which means the physician, not a mid-level provider, is the right primary target.

Why weren't concierge network physician-finder directories used as a source?

Their terms of use don't permit commercial use of the listings. They would likely be the most precise source available, but building the audience responsibly meant respecting those usage restrictions rather than scraping around them.