That is where the bulk of the patient volume is seen. No one is an employee of Wills they are all employees of our practice.Īs before the transition, our outreach into the community is through our satellite offices for the most part. We attempted to calculate what each surgeon brought to the practice in terms of tangible assets, as well as their abilities and professional efforts, and to compensate them appropriately.Įveryone in the practice is also an active faculty member at Wills, involved in the training and research programs to varying degrees. The more senior surgeons are now employees of the practice, and the more junior surgeons are buying into the partnership. We maintained our billing numbers, our 401(k) plan, our relationships with insurance companies and vendors. This made the process easier in a number of ways: Rather than starting from scratch in a lot of areas, we were able to retain structures and associations that were already in place. The other surgeons joined Mid Atlantic Retina. While we have combined forces with surgeons from other practices, the transaction was not a merger. However, fortunately, the increase in resources has made us better positioned to withstand economic changes such as the current deep recession. This change was conceived with long-term goals in mind and was set in motion well before the full brunt of the current economic downturn was felt. But in many areas the increased numbers help to improve economy and efficiency. For instance, for health care benefits and liability insurance, when you double the number of doctors you double the cost. Decisions no longer have to be driven so much by the denominator of the number of doctors.įor some expenses there is no advantage of scale. If we need outside support in some professional matter, whether it be information technology, legal, accounting, or consulting assistance, we have more pockets to dig into. In addition, the expansion has brought an increase in resources and economy of scale, in that large costs are now shared across a larger group. And the Wills training and research programs are much easier to run with all of us on the same page. With more locations, there are more possibilities to bring in new associates and get them busy as quickly as possible. We have better coverage for vacations, meeting attendance, and the like. The combination of our practices brings a number of advantages. It makes much more sense to be cooperative across the board. Clearly, there are inefficiencies in being competitors in one venue and colleagues and cooperative professionals in another. Even though we had been competitors in private practice in the community, we had all been long-time colleagues, working closely in a cooperative way at Wills. Realizing that this might be a once-in-a-career opportunity to both increase the size of Mid Atlantic Retina and make the retina service at Wills more unified, we decided to go for it. We had talked many times over the past 20 years about the possibility of joining forces, but the stars had previously not aligned the way they did about 18 months ago when this process was set in motion. Fortunately, as they were coming to this realization, leases were coming up for renewal, so the timing was good and provided the flexibility to enable their move. The nine Wills surgeons who joined Mid Atlantic Retina this year had decided for various reasons that they wanted to pull away from their multisubspecialty practices and work in a single-subspecialty retina practice. We believe this "growth spurt" will allow us to continue to provide high-quality care as before, while improving other aspects of our practice. This undertaking, which took the better part of a year to bring to fruition, makes the practice stronger and also improves the coordination of the research and training programs being conducted at Wills Eye Institute in Philadelphia. The 19 surgeons now serve the greater Philadelphia community at 12 locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. On January 1 of this year we brought onboard nine surgeons who were formerly part of two multisubspecialty practices. In 2008, we had 10 surgeons and seven locations. Our Philadelphia-area retina subspecialty practice, Mid Atlantic Retina, recently underwent a major expansion, almost doubling in size.
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