Introducing MedWay: The logistics of enrolling in a management service

What’s the best way to serve independent medical practices by handling administrative and office functions? Keep it simple. MedWay CEO David Ford explains the approach the organization takes when working with physicians — and it’s an approach that can work with just about any medical specialty.

Medical Economics: Can you describe the logistics of MedWay? When a physician or a group of doctors, a small group, may be interested in using that service, can you walk us through the sign-up process? How do they enroll?

David Ford: We have a pretty quick onboarding process. The main component is our HRIS, human resources information system, platform online. One login. Everything is integrated with one exception, under federal rules, you're actually not allowed to integrate retirement plans onto these HR platforms. But everything else, benefits, payroll, compliance, all of that works through one login. So we just get an employee census. We onboard them all into the platform. We give the physician and their staff training on how to use the platform. And then from there, we can support them as much or as little as they need. Some of our practices just take that platform and go and some of our offices need a little bit more hand-holding through the process. And we can do it either way. The other thing is, if there are those trainings that we have to do — so in California, there's trainings on, you know, like sexual harassment prevention, workplace safety, all of those are actually built into the platform. So that's another just box we can check for you, because you do have to do all that as an employer. We tried to make this very, comprehensive, I guess is the best word I'm I can use. One of the things we heard from a lot of our practices is one of the things they find overwhelming, is having a million logins, a million passwords to remember. So we tried as much as possible to put everything in one place, one login, to make it very simple and straightforward.

Medical Economics: Is Medway built out to really serve a single medical specialty, say, or can you handle different specialties that remain independent?

David Ford: We can really serve any medical specialty, I think because we're not touching sort of what I call the front the front office part of the practice, right? Really, the HR, the payroll, the benefits, the insurance looks remarkably similar in everything from, we've had conversations with pediatric practices up to neurology practices to ENT right? Even some of the surgical specialties. This part of it looks essentially the same in any of those. So at least from the medical specialty, it's not even something we think very much about.