Michael Hilts, MD

I have been in practice since 1999. For most of my career I have been in Greensboro with Piedmont Orthopedics (now Cone OrthoCare), doing non-surgical sports medicine and family medicine. But in 2014 God called me and my family to Texas, where we lived for five years.

While in Texas, some personal family health problems led me to discover the field of functional medicine, which aims to find the root cause of an illness rather than just treating symptoms. I took courses in functional medicine every chance I had, with the intention of applying my knowledge to the benefit of as many patients as possible.

My dilemma was that traditional functional medicine practitioners offer visits which are very in-depth and take much more time than a traditional practice can accommodate, and are also expensive since they typically don't contract with insurance companies. So for several years I tried to incorporate aspects of functional medicine into a busy insurance-based practice, but with variable success due to time constraints.

Becoming more and more frustrated with the broken health care system and its many inefficiencies, I was thrilled to learn about the movement called direct primary care (DPC). The DPC model allows the doctor to maintain a much smaller panel of patients while providing substantial benefits to those patients.