Why Monica McKitterick Fired the Healthcare System (and Built Her Own)

What if a primary care doctor acted like your best friend, not a conveyor belt?

Imagine paying a predictable monthly fee and getting a clinician who actually listens, spends time, and helps you get to the root causes of illness. That’s the provocation that propelled a nurse practitioner to quit a conventional medical job and build a new way of practicing family medicine. I found her story both startling and familiar — startling because the health system pushed her to tears in yoga class, familiar because so many clinicians and patients know that medicine is often rushed and transactional.

From burnout to a business that breathes

Monica McKittrick left a role where charting, administrative mandates, and C-suite demands replaced human care. She had trained for nine years to form relationships with patients, not manage dashboards. Her breaking point — crying during a yoga session from anxiety over returning to a toxic workplace — is a candid moment that should unsettle every leader trying to measure healthcare by productivity metrics alone.

She didn’t just quit. She reimagined primary care. The model she embraced is uncomplicated yet radical: a membership-based primary care practice that prioritizes time, prevention, and whole-person conversations about sleep, stress, nutrition, and movement. Think of it as an affordable concierge model — under $100 a month — where patients get same-day access and clinicians can actually practice medicine.

What direct primary care really looks like

Monica describes direct primary care as everything she went to school for. I liked her plain talk: fewer visits, longer visits, less insurance paperwork, and a focus on root causes. That means treating dis-ease, not just prescribing pills for symptoms. It means seeing multiple problems in one visit, offering transparent pricing, and creating a trusting environment that patients crave.

Her comparison to a Netflix-style membership lands. It’s not tech buzz — it’s a structural choice that removes third-party billing friction and restores physician-patient relationships. Honestly, I didn’t expect such a simple framing to be so persuasive, but it works because it reframes incentives.

How she built Impact Family Wellness — no MBA required

Monica had three nursing degrees and zero formal business training. What she did have was curiosity and an ad: a Facebook clickbait about a primary care physician making $400,000 a year and being home for dinner. That ad launched months of research, a business plan she taught herself to write, and a move to a new state where she could start fresh.

The early days were gritty. She cleaned her own clinic, networked tirelessly, and learned marketing the hard way. The lesson: patient demand exists, but awareness does not. Nobody is Googling “direct primary care” — people need education. So growth required relentless outreach and explanation, not just ads.

Expansion and the pivot from owner to teacher

Impact Family Wellness grew into three offices and seven nurse practitioners serving 2,200 patients. Yet winning a national entrepreneur competition — The Blox — and $10,000 made her confront a classic scale trap. At first she chased the idea of rapid expansion, imagining dozens of clinics as proof of success. Burnout followed.

Her pivot was revealing: instead of scaling more clinics herself, she chose to teach other clinicians to start high-quality DPC practices. That preserves her aim — more patient-centered clinics — while protecting her lifestyle. She wrote a book, created an eight-module Launch Kit, and shifted from clinic founder to ecosystem builder.

Quality control matters

One idea that stood out: Monica refuses to let mediocre clinicians dilute the DPC brand. She argues that if anyone can slap a DPC label on a practice, the model’s reputation could collapse. So her training starts with a gatekeeping question: are you the right person to run a DPC clinic? It’s not macho exclusivity; it’s stewardship.

The emphasis on provider quality is practical and moral. In Monica’s telling, the future of patient-centered care depends on clinicians who cherish relationships over metrics.

Practical tools she built — and why they matter

• DPC Launch Kit: An eight-module course taking clinicians from LLC formation to EMR and marketing.
• Book — DPC Dream Job or Total Disaster: A primer helping clinicians decide if the model suits them.
• Local-first growth: Education-focused marketing because people don’t yet understand this alternative.

These are the types of low-glamour, high-leverage choices that change care delivery far more than a flashy app ever could.

Redefining success — a lesson beyond medicine

One comment lingered: success shouldn’t be a number. Monica’s husband gave her permission to stop chasing clinic count and choose the life she wanted — travel, time with family, and meaningful work. That redefinition shifted strategy from expansion to multiplication through others, and from accumulation to influence.

What if more entrepreneurs chose that route: scale impact by teaching, not by owning every asset? It’s a gentler, smarter way to spread an idea without losing your own life to the grind.

Final thought

It’s easy to treat this story as a health sector case study, but it’s also a human story about agency. A clinician refused to accept a system that reduced people to numbers and, by designing a different payment and care structure, invited others to do the same. Whether you’re a patient, clinician, or entrepreneur, the deeper question lingers: how do we design institutions that preserve dignity and curiosity? That’s the sort of change that doesn’t fit neatly on a balance sheet — and maybe it shouldn’t.