When Dr. Danielle Kelvas founded DKMD, she set out to build more than a medical practice. She envisioned a platform that could reshape how care is delivered — a place where science and compassion coexist, where doctors listen before they prescribe, and where patients feel like human beings rather than entries in a chart.
Kelvas’s career began along the traditional path of medicine. After years of rigorous study and residency, she became the kind of physician patients trusted instinctively — sharp, empathetic, and fully engaged in their care. She thrived in fast-paced hospital environments and was deeply committed to the oath she had taken. Yet, the more she worked inside the system, the more she recognized its fault lines.
Appointments were rushed. Doctors were buried under administrative tasks. Insurance companies dictated what care could and couldn’t be given. The prevailing model rewarded volume over value, speed over quality, and symptom suppression over root-cause solutions.
“Medicine is supposed to be about people, not process,” Kelvas says. “But the system makes it incredibly hard to practice that way.”
The Pandemic as a Catalyst
While these cracks were visible for years, the COVID-19 pandemic made them impossible to ignore. In emergency rooms and clinics, doctors faced impossible workloads and impossible choices. Patients delayed critical care. Mental health needs spiked. Preventative medicine all but vanished as the system went into crisis mode.
Kelvas saw the toll — not only on patients but on the medical workforce itself. According to a 2022 report from Medscape, 47% of physicians reported burnout symptoms, a number aggravated by the pandemic’s demands. Colleagues she admired left the profession entirely. Burnout rates soared. For her, it was the final push to take action.
“The pandemic didn’t create the problems in healthcare,” she explains. “It revealed them. It was like turning on a light in a room you thought was cluttered and realizing it’s a disaster.”
The DKMD Approach
DKMD emerged from this moment of reckoning as something entirely different from the conventional model. Instead of cramming as many appointments into a day as possible, Kelvas built a patient experience around depth, not speed. Initial consultations can run more than an hour. Care plans are personalized, evidence-based, and often integrate disciplines beyond traditional medicine — nutrition, mental health counseling, lifestyle coaching, and alternative therapies where appropriate.
This is not wellness-as-a-buzzword. Every aspect is grounded in medical science, but delivered with a level of humanity that’s often missing from modern healthcare.
“In medicine, the most powerful diagnostic tool we have is listening,” Kelvas says. “When you take the time to really hear a patient’s story, you uncover connections that tests alone can’t reveal. That’s when you can treat the cause, not just the symptoms.”
The demand for this kind of personalized care is growing. The global preventive healthcare market is projected to exceed $290 billion by 2027, growing at an annual rate of 9.1% (Grand View Research). Patients increasingly want care that prioritizes prevention and wellness over crisis management.
Entrepreneurial Medicine
In many ways, Kelvas’s shift mirrors that of a founder in the tech world. She identified a system that was broken, designed a solution from the ground up, and built it to scale sustainably. She didn’t abandon medicine — she expanded it.
That expansion has required navigating challenges familiar to any entrepreneur. How do you build a model that is financially viable without succumbing to the churn-and-burn incentives of traditional healthcare? How do you attract patients in a marketplace dominated by large hospital systems and insurance networks?
Her answers have been as much about culture as operations. DKMD markets itself not as a luxury service for the few, but as a smarter, more personal alternative for anyone who values health as an investment. That positioning has resonated with a diverse patient base, from young professionals seeking preventative care to older patients managing chronic conditions.
Healthcare consumerism is on the rise: a 2023 survey by Accenture found that 70% of patients want personalized, transparent care and are willing to pay out-of-pocket for services that meet those expectations.
Building a Network of Collaboration
A key differentiator for DKMD is its collaborative ecosystem. Kelvas has cultivated relationships with specialists, therapists, nutritionists, and wellness coaches who share her philosophy. Patients can be seamlessly connected to trusted partners without the bureaucratic delays common in larger systems.
This network approach also reflects her belief that no single practitioner has all the answers. “Healthcare is a team sport,” she says. “When you remove the silos and get everyone talking, the patient wins.”
Challenging the Status Quo
Kelvas doesn’t shy away from criticizing the industry she’s trying to improve. She’s vocal about the insurance-driven structure that prioritizes billable codes over meaningful outcomes. She questions the overreliance on pharmaceuticals as a first-line solution. And she points out the long-term economic folly of neglecting preventative care in favor of emergency intervention.
“We spend trillions reacting to illness, and a fraction of that preventing it,” she says. “If healthcare were a business — which in many ways it is — that would be a terrible strategy. It’s like refusing to maintain your car and then paying a fortune when the engine blows.”
Indeed, the U.S. spends nearly $4.3 trillion annually on healthcare, but only about 3% goes toward prevention (CDC). DKMD’s model is designed to shift that balance.
Her critiques are not just rhetoric; they are the foundation for the DKMD business model. By focusing on prevention, personalization, and patient education, she aims to reduce both costs and suffering over the long term.
While many entrepreneurs chase rapid growth, Kelvas is taking a measured approach. Expanding too quickly could dilute the very qualities that make DKMD different. Instead, she’s focusing on refining the model, building a strong team, and creating systems that allow for both consistency and adaptability.
She envisions a future where DKMD clinics — or partner practices trained in its methods — operate in multiple cities. But she insists that scale should never come at the cost of authenticity. “The trust we build with patients is the brand,” she says. “Lose that, and you lose everything.”
A New Sustainable Prescription for Healthcare
For Kelvas, the entrepreneurial leap was never about leaving medicine behind. It was about reclaiming it. By blending medical expertise with business strategy, she has created a practice that feels both deeply personal and strategically sound.
Her journey also underscores a larger truth about innovation: the most transformative ideas often come from insiders who know a system’s pain points intimately. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals — the ones on the front lines — are uniquely positioned to reimagine what care could look like.
“Entrepreneurship in healthcare isn’t just about technology or new treatments,” Kelvas says. “It’s about designing better experiences, better systems, and ultimately, better lives.”
As DKMD grows, it stands as a proof-of-concept that compassionate, high-quality care doesn’t have to be an exception. It can be a standard — if you’re willing to challenge the rules and write your own.
