Lessons Learned Operating Four New Practices in North Carolina According to Cary Medical Management Executive
Cary Medical Management (CMM) experienced impressive growth throughout North Carolina in 2021, and now operates practices in five cities across the state in both urban and rural areas. CMM acquired practices in Rocky Mount, Wendell, Greensboro and Carrboro this year as well as a care management company, in addition to its flagship clinic, Generations Family practice in Cary. This growth and management is already delivering on the company’s mission to provide better quality care at lower prices and to support primary care practices with CMM’s tech-infused capabilities.
To close out the year, Jonathan Fowler, Vice President of Operations at CMM, highlights five challenges he – and other value-based primary care clinics – experienced in 2021 and lessons learned to benefit other practices in the healthcare industry moving forward. Excerpts from these lessons include:
- Value Based Care Knowledge is Scarce: Value-based care can provide new revenue through shared savings and incentive programs. But sadly, most independent practices aren’t familiar with how to navigate these murky waters and keep their practice independent. The challenge seems to be worse in more rural clinics, which have had less attention from the insurance companies and the ACOs, and even more patients in need.
- Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Make it Worse: With the primary care shortage, 100% of a provider’s time should be devoted to caring for patients. Sadly, a huge amount of time is spent documenting in the EHR. Add to this challenge the menagerie of fragmented EHRs on the market, and the lost productivity when a physician must change their EHR, and you have one of the largest challenges facing independent primary care.
- COVID Makes Everything Worse: Primary care practices struggle with the challenging safety, personnel and supply chain landscape, and we’ve got a perfect storm of poorly conceptualized processes and systems that have zero resiliency to a global pandemic. COVID keeps patients out of the office during surges and creates a backlog of delayed care that primary care providers scramble to catch up in the valleys between the waves.
- Regulation is Stifling Innovation: On an average day, primary care practices have to deal with no less than six regulators: DHHS, FTC, DOI, DOL, DEA and FCC. Massive amounts of regulation have been created to address systemic healthcare problems in the United States, and little of it was written with the challenges of a primary care shortage, the innovation of value-based care, and the scourge COVID in mind.
- Competition is Key: The rules that keep healthcare and technology companies from monopolizing our communities and independent providers can fuel the innovation needed to change the way healthcare is delivered. The more organizations that race with others to build value-based care knowledge and support independent primary care practices will improve innovation.
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