Dive Brief:
- With progress driven largely by analytics, a New York-based medical practice has grown 15-fold since 1996.
- Westmed Medical Group began in 1996 with 16 physicians, but has gone through extraordinary expansion, and now has 250 doctors caring for more than 250,000 patients today. It boasts $285 million in annual revenue. Westmed operates five large ambulatory care sites, which are supported by centralized back office services such as a call center, billing and IT.
- Westmed leaders believe that doctors are highly data-driven and will respond when it's easier for them to acquire data for disease-specific guidelines and pre-populated forms. They contend that this approach creates efficiencies, a belief borne out by the fact that while most of multi-specialty groups run at 5.5 to 6 employees per physician, they were running at 3.91 as of last month.
Dive Insight:
Virtually every sizable medical group in the US does some form of analytics, and makes some effort to get its doctors into line with guidelines. But more often than not, their efforts are unsuccessful, as doctors are reluctant to change their practice style just because an administrator told them to do so. And with doctors resisting these standards, there is little change in the areas of efficiency and effectiveness.
However, Westmed takes a different approach than many medical practices do, according to CEO Simeon Schwartz, MD. "The fundamental nature of our management strategy is that we do not tell doctors what to do—we show them what they are doing," Schwartz told attendees at MGMA's
2014 annual conference. It appears that when doctors get a look at how they practice, and see what the results are, they're far more likely to make beneficial changes.