Introducing MedWay: Could this management network grow?

Some state medical societies offer various management services for physicians’ practices, but it appears MedWay, started this year by CMA Physician Services of the California Medical Association, may have unique offerings that could be used across state lines. CEO David Ford discusses expansion possibilities around the nation.

Medical Economics: Are you aware of any other state medical associations or societies that are offering this level of management service for independent physicians?

David Ford: Not that we found. I think we found other medical societies that offer pieces of what we're offering. We've talked to a few of the medical societies back east that offer, like, some of them may have a retirement plan that they help with, some of them have staffing services to help you source staffing. So we found some of those pieces. The HR-payroll pieces that we offer, we have not found that anywhere. And as I say, that's why we've actually had some conversations with some of our colleagues in some of the smaller states back east about how we could pair up the Medway platform with some of those pieces that they already have in place. But obviously I'm not going to name names at the moment, but, yeah, I think we're at some level of conversation with about four or five of our fellow medical societies back east.

Medical Economics: Not to get too deep in the weeds on that, but would you anticipate that MedWay could serve as a business model for other societies to pick up on? Or, would you provide management services across state lines? Or both?

David Ford: We certainly could. And as we've talked to other other societies, the model may look different depending on which state we go into, how much we're doing, versus how much they're doing. We've looked at a couple different options for that. What I've kind of said to a lot of my colleagues in other state medical societies is, you know, we spent three years building this thing. It's a lot of headaches, a lot of sleepless nights. I think I had more hair when we started this process. And what I'm hoping for these other medical societies and these, you know, these other organizations, is to save them a lot of that headache, to say, look, this thing is already built, the platform, our integrated insurance broker, our retirement broker, our staffing components, all of this stuff we can turn on in any of the 50 states pretty quickly. So what I would hope is to save a lot of those societies everything that I just put myself through and my colleagues put themselves through for the last three years, and say, let's partner up on this. Let's not waste a lot of time rebuilding this over and over and over again, when we can just bring it partner up, bring it to your state. The other thing I will mention really quickly because kind of unrelated thought, as we've rolled out Medway, we've been approached, for example, by a few dental practices. So you know, HR, payroll looks pretty much the same in a small dental practice as it does in a small medical practice. So for at least this sort of, what we call Medway 1.0 this first set of offerings, we are in pretty deep conversation about signing up a few dental practices, so that's part of the conversation too, while we're talking about other states also, what are some maybe similar health care providers out there that we might be able to provide assistance to as well?