Introducing MedWay: An administrative management service for independent physicians

In 2025, the California Medical Association launched MedWay, a new management system designed to serve physicians in independent practice. A subscription service, it offers doctors and practice administrators assistance with human resources, payroll, employee benefits, insurance, and more. Medway CEO David Ford offers this introduction to MedWay.

Medical Economics: Can you introduce Medway and explain how that started? What was the reason for it?

David Ford: It's a new offering from CMA Physician Services, kind of a different one, to be honest, and something we're very, very excited about. The easiest way to describe it is actually to talk about how we got to this point. About three years ago, the CMA Physician Services team did a very, very deep dive on independent medical practices. We did one-on-one meetings, surveys, focus groups, kind of a little bit of of the, you name it, to really try to understand what the challenges were. We've all seen the numbers, right? Independent practice has been declining, especially in California, where we're a highly integrated medical marketplace, and we really wanted to understand, what were what were the challenges that we're facing, the independent practices? We tried to go in with just no preconceived notions, just asking physicians, what keeps you up at night, what are you facing? And while there were a lot of things, a lot of topics that came up, one thing that came up over and over and over again were what I call the quintessential small-business hassles of running a medical practice. A lot of physicians started talking to us about HR problems, staffing, payroll, benefits, insurance, that sort of back office small-business challenges of running a medical practice. Almost 100% of the physician we talked to said that was a problem, and my team took a step back, and we thought, this really feels like something we might be able to help with. So over the last three years, we developed a really comprehensive offering that we now call Medway, where physicians, on a subscription basis, can outsource a lot of those functions out to Medway. We have an online platform where they can manage all of their HR from timekeeping, payroll compliance — yes, even in very complicated California — their employee benefits all in one place, one login. We also have a support layer where we have HR specialists on our team so physicians don't have to call 1-800 number or deal with an AI chat bot. They have a human being who understands them, works with them, knows their practice, that they can call anytime to get the support they need. So as I say, it's a little different from things we I've done before, but we are very excited about it. We feel like it's fitting a really important need in the physician marketplace.