In 2013 Hint Health founders Zak Holdsworth (a Stanford MBA grad from New Zealand) and Graham Melcher (a computer science grad from UC Berkeley) got together and asked the question what would it take to fundamentally transform the US healthcare system from first principles, for the better. Zak wanted to help recreate the patient-centered experience he had received from his childhood family doctor, and Graham wanted to help create a better way for his family of physicians who were largely disappointed by the system. 

They were seeking ideas that were not incremental improvements to the system but solutions that could address root cause problems, and could in theory do so at scale without compromise. In this journey they came to the conclusion that in order to achieve this, they would need to somehow both help restore the integrity of primary care, and eliminate the insurance fee-for-service infrastructure from routine care delivery and payment. 

During their research they repeatedly came across Direct Primary Care physicians who, although were few in number, had achieved both of these objectives and were doing so passionately as part of a rapidly growing community. In the absence of being able to identify anything that came even remotely close in terms of real world impact and long term potential for transformative change, they decided to focus their energy on supporting the growth and success of this movement. They started their journey by building the operating system for DPC and investing in education, events, and research designed to accelerate the movement, with a vision of redesigning the healthcare system to enable easy access to high quality, affordable care. The rest is history!