If you found your current clinician through an insurance directory, there's a good chance you never checked their board certification. Most people don't. The insurance company handled the vetting, or we assume it did, and we default to whoever's name shows up in network. It's not laziness. It's just how the system was built: pick a plan, pick a name from a list, hope for the best.



Direct Primary Care changes that arrangement. At Rhode Island Direct Primary Care in North Kingstown, there's no insurance company standing between you and your provider, which is exactly the appeal: real appointment time, direct access, a relationship instead of a transaction. But it also means the job of checking credentials shifts to you. That's a fair question to ask, and it deserves a straight answer, not a brochure line about “highly qualified providers.”

What Board Certification Actually Tells You

Board certification isn't the same as a medical license. A license means a provider is legally allowed to practice medicine or nursing in a given state. It's the floor, not the ceiling. Board certification means a provider went further: additional training in a specific specialty, a rigorous exam written and administered by that specialty's governing board, and ongoing recertification requirements to prove their skills haven't gone stale a decade after they first passed a test.

For physicians, that governing body is the American Board of Internal Medicine. To sit for the ABIM exam, a physician has to complete an accredited residency in internal medicine, typically three years of supervised training focused entirely on adult patients, then pass a full-day exam covering everything from routine preventive care to the kind of rare, overlapping conditions most people will thankfully never encounter. After that, certification isn't permanent. Physicians have to participate in ongoing Maintenance of Certification (MOC) to keep it current, a program ABIM designed specifically to demonstrate that a physician remains current in medical knowledge and clinical practice throughout their career, not just on the day they first passed the exam.

For nurse practitioners, certification runs through bodies like the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners Certification Board. That process requires a graduate degree from an accredited nurse practitioner program, hundreds of hours of supervised clinical practice with real patients, and a national certification exam tied to a specific patient population, adult-gerontology, family, pediatrics, and so on. Like physician certification, it isn't a one-time badge. It has to be renewed.

None of this is decoration for a website bio. It's the mechanism that keeps a “doctor” or “nurse practitioner” title tied to a current, independently verified standard of practice, whether or not an insurance company is anywhere in the picture.

Meet the Board-Certified Team at Rhode Island Direct Primary Care

Both providers on our team at Rhode Island Direct Primary Care hold current board certification, and it's worth knowing what each one actually means for the care you'll receive.

Dr. Letitia Horrigan, DO, is board certified in Internal Medicine. That certification means she completed residency training focused specifically on adult primary care, then passed the ABIM exam that tests her ability to manage everything from routine checkups to the kind of overlapping chronic conditions, diabetes complicated by hypertension complicated by thyroid disease, say, that a rushed fifteen-minute insurance-based visit rarely leaves room to untangle. Internal medicine training is built around exactly that kind of complexity. It's the specialty most primary care patients need without necessarily knowing that's what they need.

Deanna Wright, MSN, AGNP-C, holds her certification as an Adult-Gerontology Nurse Practitioner. That credential focuses her training specifically on adult and older adult patients, which happens to be the population that makes up most of any primary care panel and the one most likely to be juggling more than one chronic condition at a time. The AGNP-C credential signals she's been tested specifically on managing that population, not general pediatrics or acute urgent care, but the ongoing, longitudinal care adults actually need from a primary care relationship.

Every patient at Rhode Island Direct Primary Care is seen by a provider who has been independently tested and held to a specialty-specific standard, not someone who graduated once, got a license, and was never formally checked again.

How to Verify a Provider's Board Certification Yourself

You shouldn't have to take a practice's word for any of this, and you don't have to. Every physician's board certification is publicly searchable through Certification Matters, a free verification tool run by the American Board of Medical Specialties. Enter a provider's name and state, and it will tell you exactly which board certified them and whether that certification is current. Nurse practitioner certifications are similarly verifiable directly through the certifying board's own lookup tool.

This matters more, not less, once you step outside the insurance system. A DPC practice isn't required by a payer to prove anything to you. That means the practice's own transparency is the whole ballgame. A practice that's confident in its credentials will make them easy to find and easy to verify. A practice that gets vague or defensive when you ask is telling you something too.

What Board Certification Doesn't Guarantee

It's worth being honest about the limits here, because overselling a credential is its own kind of red flag. Board certification tells you a provider met a rigorous, specialty-specific bar and keeps meeting it. It doesn't tell you whether you'll personally click with that provider, whether their communication style fits how you want to talk about your health, or whether the practice itself runs the way you need it to.

That's a separate set of questions, and it's exactly why Rhode Island Direct Primary Care offers a meet and greet before you commit to anything. Credentials get you in the door with confidence. The relationship is still something you have to build for yourself, one conversation at a time.

Why Certification Matters Even More Outside the Insurance System

Traditional insurance networks add a layer of credentialing oversight, even when patients never see it happen and wouldn't know how to check it if they tried. A Direct Primary Care practice sets its own bar, because there's no network administrator doing it on the practice's behalf. That's a feature when the practice takes it seriously and builds a team around real, verifiable standards. It's a real risk when it doesn't, and a patient has no easy way to find out until something goes wrong.

Rhode Island Direct Primary Care built its team around board-certified providers because it's the standard patients deserve, not because a payer required it or a regulator was checking. If you're weighing whether a membership-based practice can actually replace your current primary care relationship, board certification is one of the fastest, most concrete ways to check. Ask any provider you're considering, Direct Primary Care or otherwise, to name their certifying board. A specific, confident answer is a good sign. A vague one, or a change of subject, is worth pressing on before you hand over a membership fee.

The Bottom Line

Choosing a provider outside the traditional insurance system doesn't mean choosing less oversight. It means the oversight comes from a different place: the provider's own board certification, kept current and publicly verifiable, instead of a network contract you'll never actually read. Rhode Island Direct Primary Care's team holds exactly that kind of certification, and we'd rather you check it yourself than take our word for it.

The best way to know if a provider is the right fit is to talk to them directly. Schedule a meet and greet with Rhode Island Direct Primary Care, serving North Kingstown and the surrounding Rhode Island communities, and ask Dr. Horrigan or Deanna Wright about their credentials yourself.