Let Them See Doctors.

The best medicine in America was never meant for you. It was priced for the few, designed for the few, and guarded like a privilege. Then something shifted — and a quiet movement of physicians began opening the door. In Babylon, New York, Dr. Ruth Solomon and April MD are one of the reasons it is staying open.

By the Doctoloop Editorial Team · Babylon, New York | Spring 2026

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Picture it. A private elevator opens onto a clinic that feels more like a five-star hotel than a doctor's office. There is no waiting room — because there is no waiting. A concierge greets you by name. Your physician has read your full history before you walked through the door. You will spend the next hour together, unhurried, talking about your life and your health as though they are related — because they are.

This is Atria. This is Sollis. This is what medicine looks like when the bill is $60,000 a year — a figure confirmed by the New York Post. For most Americans, it has always existed in a different world entirely. A world with a very clear message at the door: this is not for you.

That message is starting to change. Not overnight, not loudly, but steadily — driven by thousands of physicians who left the traditional system and patients who refused to keep accepting it. In Babylon, New York, Dr. Ruth Solomon is one of those physicians. Her practice, April MD, is one of those doors.

"I got into medicine to know my patients. Somewhere along the way, the system forgot that was the entire point."

— A SYSTEM UNDER PRESSURE —

To understand why practices like April MD matter, you have to first understand what American primary care has become.

The numbers are stark. The typical primary care physician today carries a panel of more than 2,000 patients. To see them all in a year, each appointment must be compressed to seven to ten minutes — barely enough time to make eye contact, let alone understand a life. Research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that physicians in outpatient settings spend only 27% of their day in direct contact with patients. The remaining time disappears into the machinery of the system: electronic records, insurance forms, prior authorizations, billing codes.

For every 15 minutes a physician spends with a patient, they spend 9 minutes charting in an EHR. The average doctor loses the equivalent of nearly two full months every year to administrative work alone. Over half of primary care physicians now report burnout — and 30% say they plan to leave patient care entirely within three years.

The shortage of physicians makes this worse. According to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges published in 2024, the United States is projected to face a shortfall of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034. When doctors are scarce, appointments become precious. The average wait time to see a new physician in a major U.S. city now ranges from 27 to 70 days.

The result is a system that exhausts the people inside it and fails the people it was built to serve.

2,000+ Average number of patients a traditional primary care physician manages
7–10 min Average length of a primary care appointment in the traditional model
55% Primary care physicians reporting burnout (Tebra, 2025)
27–70 days Average wait time for a new patient appointment in major U.S. cities
124,000 Projected U.S. physician shortage by 2034 (AAMC)

— THE RISE OF SOMETHING DIFFERENT —

In 2005, there were approximately 150 physicians practicing in alternative care models in the United States. By 2024, that number had grown to roughly 12,000. The market itself, valued at $7.35 billion in 2024, is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of more than 10%, reaching nearly $20 billion by 2034.

What is driving this? Two forces are colliding. On one side, physicians — burned out, overwhelmed, drowning in paperwork — are looking for a way to practice medicine the way they imagined when they applied to medical school. On the other, patients who have spent years waiting weeks for seven-minute appointments are quietly deciding: there has to be a better way.

It is worth being precise about the landscape. Concierge medicine — at its most visible — means practices like Atria and Sollis, where annual fees can reach $60,000 and patients retain their insurance alongside a retainer. They are extraordinary. They are also explicitly built for a narrow tier of society.

Direct Primary Care is a different model entirely, and one that Dr. Solomon is careful to distinguish. In DPC, the physician steps outside the insurance system almost entirely. Patients pay a flat monthly membership fee that covers the full scope of primary care — no billing codes, no prior authorizations, no profit-driven administrative machinery standing between doctor and patient. The goal, as Dr. Solomon puts it, is to remain free from the burdens of insurance-driven administration, which is what makes it possible to offer evidence-based, quality care at a genuinely affordable rate.

"The concierge model isn't a luxury upgrade," she says. "Direct Primary Care is what medicine looks like when you remove everything that was never supposed to be there."

Mid-tier and DPC practices have captured nearly 40% of the market's revenue in 2025. Independent standalone practices — physician-owned, community-rooted — are growing at the fastest rate of any segment in the industry. The Atrias of the world are no longer the only model. They are simply the oldest and most visible one.

— BABYLON, NEW YORK —

Babylon is not Midtown Manhattan. It is a Suffolk County town on the South Shore of Long Island — the kind of place where the commuter rail runs through the center of a village that still has a diner, where people know their neighbors, where families have lived for two and three generations. The healthcare desert that affects rural America does not look like Babylon. But the fractures in the traditional system are visible here too: overbooked practices, rushed appointments, physicians who left or retired and were never replaced.

Dr. Ruth Solomon opened April MD here because this is where she lives. And because she believed her neighbors deserved something better.

Her decision to leave the traditional practice model was not made quickly. It came after years — and a crisis that sharpened everything. During the pandemic, she made the kind of choice that does not appear in any clinical guideline: she and her family sent their infant son to live with his grandmother for five months to keep him safe while she continued to care for patients. When restrictions finally lifted, she returned to a corporate clinical environment that felt impossible to sustain. She felt overworked, replaceable, and hemmed in by a system that prioritized profitability over patient care. She considered leaving clinical medicine entirely.

What brought her back — differently — was Direct Primary Care. She researched it, spoke with physicians who had made the transition, and recognized something that aligned with both her values and her original reason for becoming a doctor. She took the leap.

"People would come in and say, I haven't had a doctor who actually looked at me in years," she says. "Not really looked. Not really listened. And that broke my heart — because that's what medicine is supposed to be."

At April MD, the arithmetic is different. The patient panel is small enough that Dr. Solomon knows each person's history — not as a file, but as a story. Appointments are not timed. Same-day and next-day availability is not a premium add-on; it is simply the standard. Patients reach Dr. Solomon directly, not through a call center or a nurse's voicemail chain. When something urgent happens, the line is open.

"This is not a concierge practice for the wealthy. This is Direct Primary Care for Long Island."

— WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE —

The contrast with the traditional model is not subtle. In the fee-for-service world, a physician seeing 25 to 30 patients a day has roughly 8 minutes of actual face time with each. Those 8 minutes must cover the presenting concern, the history, the examination, the plan, and the documentation — which continues after the patient leaves.

In a Direct Primary Care practice, that same physician sees perhaps six to ten patients a day. Appointments run 30 to 60 minutes. There is time to notice things: how a patient is carrying themselves, what they're not saying, whether the anxiety they're presenting with has a physical origin or a life one. There is time for the kind of preventive conversation that catches problems before they become emergencies.

This is not simply better for patients. Research suggests it is better for the healthcare system. Early detection, continuous monitoring, and genuine patient-physician relationships reduce emergency department visits and hospitalizations. The DPC model, long dismissed as a boutique indulgence, turns out to have structural benefits that extend well beyond the exam room.

For Dr. Solomon, who focuses on primary care and women's health, the model allows her to practice in the way she was trained. To see the whole person. To coordinate care, not just deliver it. To be the physician she set out to be.

April MD serves all of Nassau and Suffolk County, and the practice is built to be accessible to Long Island families — not to replicate the $60,000 experience of a Midtown flagship, but to make the substance of that experience available to people who live and work in communities like Babylon.

— A MOVEMENT, NOT AN ANOMALY —

It would be easy to read Dr. Solomon's story as an individual one — one physician making a different choice. But the numbers tell a larger story.

In American healthcare, most people are on the wrong side of a gap that was never supposed to exist. They wait 27 to 70 days to see a physician. They get seven minutes when they finally do. Their doctor is burned out, underwater, and running behind. They leave with their quieter concerns unspoken because there simply was not time. For a long time, they accepted this because there was no visible alternative. That is changing.

In 2024, 43% of physicians reported burnout symptoms serious enough to affect their practice, according to market research compiled by Mordor Intelligence. The percentage of doctors converting to DPC or alternative models has grown substantially each year for the past decade. The independent, standalone practice segment is projected to grow at the highest compound annual growth rate of any ownership model through 2034.

The patients are moving too. A 2025 global benefits survey by Aon found that 65% of employees prefer personalized healthcare options over their current benefits — a figure that reflects not just a preference, but a growing awareness that the current system was not designed with them in mind.

What this adds up to is a restructuring. Not a sudden disruption — medicine moves slowly, as it should — but a steady, building shift in where physicians want to practice and what patients are willing to pay to be seen, really seen, by a doctor who knows them.

$7.35B U.S. DPC & concierge medicine market value in 2024 (Grand View Research)
10.33% Projected annual growth rate through 2030
12,000 Independent physicians in alternative models as of 2024, up from ~150 in 2005
43% Physicians reporting burnout symptoms in 2024 (Mordor Intelligence)
65% Employees who prefer personalized healthcare options (Aon, 2025)

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Dr. Solomon is not the beginning of this story. But she is an example of where it is going: away from the luxury flagships and into the communities where most people actually live. Into places like Babylon.

"The future of primary care isn't a waiting room. It's a relationship."

— THE DOOR IS OPEN —

Change in healthcare is never loud. It does not arrive with a single announcement or a dramatic moment. It comes the way most meaningful things do — quietly, incrementally, through the accumulated decisions of people who decided the old way no longer worked.

The $60,000 practices still exist. The gap between what the wealthiest Americans receive and what everyone else gets is still wide. But the certainty that this is simply how things must be — that has cracked. And in that crack, something is growing.

There is a particular kind of grief that sets in when you realize your doctor does not really know you. You have seen them twice a year for a decade, but they reach for the chart before they reach for your name. You have seven minutes, and you use them on the loudest problem, and the quieter ones wait for another day that never quite arrives.

That grief is not a personal failing. It is a structural one. And the Direct Primary Care movement is, at its core, a refusal to accept it. It is physicians saying: I did not go into medicine to process patients. It is patients saying: I deserve a doctor who has time to look at me.

Dr. Ruth Solomon and April MD are part of that refusal — not the loudest part, not the most famous, but perhaps the most representative: a physician who chose her community, built something she believes in, and practices medicine the way it was always supposed to be practiced. In a town on the South Shore of Long Island, the door is open. That is not a small thing.

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UPCOMING: Free Webinar with Dr. Ruth Solomon

"The Health of Women Who Lead: 5 Medical Signals High-Performing Women Should Know"

Monday, May 4 · 12:30 PM ET

Hosted by Doctoloop · Free to attend · Open to all

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Dr. Ruth Solomon, MD — April MD | Babylon, New York

Direct Primary Care & Women's Health · Serving Nassau & Suffolk County, Long Island

More info about Dr. Ruth Solomon - here