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HEALTH IN PLACE
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Across Vituity, street medicine programs forge stronger bonds between clinicians and medically underserved communities and reinvigorate a passion for medicine.
Published April 19, 2022
One side is the stuff you signed up for —healing patients, changing lives, making a difference, and working on the leading edge of science.
You’re never explicitly warned about the other side —which involves working until midnight to finish your documentation, tracking and reporting quality data, recruiting new providers and staff, and endlessly renegotiating your rates with payers.
As a physician partner in a small independent anesthesia group, I’ve gradually watched the business side of medicine overtake the human side. My colleagues and I loved our patients and our independence. We really didn’t want to become corporate employees. But runaway complexity on the business side of medicine was taking its toll on our quality of life.
Fortunately, we found a solution. Joining Vituity, the nation’s largest multispecialty physician-owned partnership, solved our thorniest business challenges while allowing us to remain locally autonomous. In this article, I share how we made the decision to affiliate and what excites us most about this opportunity to deliver integrated, patient-centric care.
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For over 30 years, Folsom Anesthesia Medical Group (FAMG) has provided exceptional perioperative care to Dignity Health Mercy Hospital of Folsom in Sacramento County, California. As a democratic physician-owned practice, FAMG is committed to clinical quality, innovation, and bringing the latest care advances to its community hospital patients.
In addition to providing anesthesia services for general and orthopedic surgery, obstetrics, and several specialist programs, FAMG also supports the region’s newest emergency department. In recent years, we have worked to bring advances such as regional anesthesia to Folsom.
While my partners and I loved our independence and democratic culture, we definitely faced some challenges as shared owners. Running an anesthesia practice today is much more complex than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. Some of the emerging challenges we grappled with include:
1. Recruiting
Even in our beautiful location at the foot of the Sierras, we had difficulty attracting top-notch talent to our community hospital practice. At just 11 full-time anesthesiologists, our group was stretched somewhat thin on the clinical side, which left even less time for the business of medicine.
2. Contracting
Negotiating rates with payers involves time, legwork, and red tape. And with so many anesthesia groups consolidating into larger entities, our tiny partnership was at a disadvantage. What’s more, we knew that recently signed federal laws around surprise billing would make us even more dependent on effective contracting.
3. Hospital relations
Our contract with Folsom requires us to meet ever-rising quality and patient experience expectations and collaborate with the hospital on initiatives. We knew that to be a good partner, we needed to create more bandwidth for hospital-focused activities.
4. Quality of Life
Due to increasing administrative burden and overhead costs, we found ourselves working harder while taking home less pay. And given industry trends, we worried that small independent groups like ours might eventually become unsustainable.
As much as we loved our independence, we decided to be proactive about our future. So we made a strategic decision to explore new options.
Vituity has a culture that not only supports innovation but encourages it, and I was really drawn to that.
What makes Vituity unique is our extraordinary sense of teamwork. When I visit the emergency department, it feels like an extension of my ICU. I see friends, colleagues, and, most importantly, partners looking out for our sickest patients and each other. In the end, the patient benefits most.
— Pablo Echeverria, MD
Critical Care Medical Director
At the decision stage, we considered many alternatives, from courting private equity to affiliating with a corporate anesthesia group. However, the choice kept coming back to culture. We all wanted to maintain our democratic values and autonomy over our local affairs. Fortunately, we found a solution in our own backyard.
Q. How would you explain physician ownership asa physician group practice model to someone who has never experienced it?
Payton McGowen (PM): When I think about ownership, the word that comes to mind is empowerment. As physician owners, we each have a say in how we run our practice and care for patients. Everyone from the medical director to the newest attending has a voice.
Sachin Patel (SP): To me, ownership means I succeed when our practice succeeds. We each have a direct stake in the quality of our care and a voice in how we deliver it. This energizes us to solve problems, innovate, and work as a team.
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Originally Published May 27, 2021
A Patient-Centric Paradigm Shift in Care Delivery: Redefining Care Delivery on Patients’ Terms
Street Medicine: Our programs have forged stronger bonds between clinicians and medically underserved communities
Hospital-at-Home Programs: Research has shown these programs have benefits to patients, providers and hospitals.
TERMS OF USEPRIVACY POLICYSITE MAP
CCPA POINT OF COLLECTION NOTICECCPA PRIVATE POLICY
COPYRIGHT © CEP AMERICA, LLC, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.