In this episode of The DocBuddy Journal, host Erik Sunset sits down with Eric Passon, founder and CEO of Ancore Health. They discuss the evolving landscape of healthcare in 2025, exploring how medical groups can thrive amid fee schedule cuts, staffing challenges, and cultural shifts.
Passon shares his expertise on building high-performing medical groups through strong physician leadership, transparent performance metrics, and alignment between financial sustainability and organizational mission.
The conversation covers the transition from RVU-based incentives to purpose-driven operations, the impact of AI on healthcare efficiency, and practical strategies for navigating uncertainty in the new year. Essential listening for healthcare leaders seeking to balance robust fundamentals with transformative purpose.
Click to expand and read this episode's transcript.
Erik Sunset: [00:00:00] All right. Hello. And welcome back. I’m Erik Sunset, your host of the DocBuddy Journal here at DocBuddy. Of course, we deliver healthcare solutions to take the pain and cost out of broken workflows like with Op Note, which gives ASCs the power of instantly generated operative reports approved from the point of care.
Erik Sunset: You can learn more about Op Note and all of our solutions at docbuddy.com. And today we’re joined by Eric Passon. Eric is the founder and CEO of Ancore Health. Eric, thanks so much for joining us.
Eric Passon: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Erik with a K.
Erik Sunset: Yeah, great name. We can agree to disagree on the spelling. Can’t really lose with a name like Eric. before we get into sort of the meat and potatoes of the show, what else should listeners know about you and your work at Ancore Health?
Eric Passon: Yeah, great question. We are, um, we’re a niche consulting firm serving medical groups across the country. We work with health systems, independent medical groups and corporate entities. And our sole focus is helping them become [00:01:00] high performing, um, and, and really, you know, bringing physicians back to the business table.
Eric Passon: And, and doing that blocking and tackling really well and ensuring there’s strong alignment between the financials and in the mission of the organization.
Erik Sunset: Yeah. And the blocking and tackling obviously a fundamental to the successful operation of any business. Obviously providers go into the field to treat patients, but you don’t get to remain an independent physician for long. If your fundamentals aren’t sound operating an actual business. So now one of the things we wanted to cover today, Eric, was the shift from 2024.
Erik Sunset: Over to 2025, a lot of factors there, obviously recently released, uh, CMS final payment rules for the year, which may be not so recent now that we’re in February, but that’s news. Uh, we have a new administration in the White House. What are you seeing as some of the big deltas from 2024 over to 2025?[00:02:00]
Eric Passon: Yeah, we, we’re seeing a lot of obviously with the new administration, there’s maximum uncertainty, um, in terms of what might happen into the future. You know, you noted something that is happening, which is. Another cut to the fee schedule, it’s been a roughly 30 percent cut over the last 10 or so years, and that’s been a death of 1000 cuts for independent medical groups, which has driven physicians into health system employment models or private equity, depending on their specialty.
Eric Passon: And the future has a lot of uncertainty as it relates to things like site neutrality, 340B reform, CON laws. Medicaid cuts and things of that nature. And with a lot of our clients, the focus, um, you know, coming out of covid, where maybe volume has picked back up, um, and [00:03:00] maybe we’re getting to a place where we can focus on on growth and strategy into the future is how do we, how do we, uh, optimize our existing physician network and how do we deal with this changing workforce?
Eric Passon: Especially the, the different generations of physicians that are a part of our medical group. Now, we have certain older physicians that were in private practice and sort of understand some of these economic factors affecting the, the financial sustainability of the practice. But then you have newer physicians that have never been in private practice, maybe looking for more work life balance.
Eric Passon: Um. Opportunities, if you will, that also have to be brought along to understand these changing dynamics. So I feel like a lot of our time is spent really getting physician leaders and administrators on the same page around what does success mean and how can we, how can we drive towards, uh, that vision in a [00:04:00] way that’s aligned with the mission statement on the website?
Erik Sunset: Well, you, you mentioned one of the dog whistles for me, which is COVID. And this is kind of a long walk for a short drink of water. But when you look at all of the, all of the surveys, all the reporting across the board, pick your source, but pre COVID, one of the core drivers of physician burnouts, and that can, the end results of burnout can be a lot of things.
Erik Sunset: It could be selling a practice and going the employed routes could be leaving the field altogether. But the prime driver of burnout pre Covid was a lack of autonomy, it was bad software that the government says that you need to use or you’ll be reimbursed less through Medicare. But post Covid, it really revolves around staffing.
Erik Sunset: And you still have the other factors as well, lack of autonomy, too much paperwork, too much administration, um, if you will. So as you are combing through the, the fundamentals. With your clients and with the broader marketplace, how does that lack of staffing like that lack of ability to just make a higher forget about a great hire or even a good [00:05:00] hire?
Erik Sunset: But how are you navigating?
Eric Passon: That’s another good question. Staffing, so staffing’s two, two fold issue. One is The actual cost has increased since covid. Um, labor cost has increased in addition to, you know, finding the right people. A lot of, when we look at, you know, within the same client, we could have practices that are high performing.
Eric Passon: In other words, that the time to access care Is short, you know, they’re collecting, they’ve got really strong front end revenue cycle processes. They’re efficient, you know, and their patient intake process versus practices that may may be underperforming on some of those key metrics. A lot of times it comes down to, uh, practice managers that that have been in private practice or have business acumen or whatever that may be, uh, within the practice itself.
Eric Passon: So having strong staff that [00:06:00] are. understand and have sound fundamentals when it comes to the business processes is, is everything. Um, and that, that’s where it comes into play of having strong physician leadership because, uh, not, not every, we don’t want physicians to become CPAs. They don’t, they shouldn’t have to sort through a bunch of spreadsheets, but the physician leader should have a baseline of understanding of what’s going on with the business of the practice that they can then convey to.
Eric Passon: other physicians, um, that are, that are primarily taking care of people.
Erik Sunset: Well, to go back, I really like the phraseology blocking and tackling. Obviously, you need to have staff to operate like as a baseline requirement. But that physician leadership piece is really interesting. Do you count culture? Because ultimately, culture comes from the top, no matter what organization you’re in.
Erik Sunset: Some cultures are better than others, uh, just, that’s just how the world works. So is [00:07:00] physician leadership as a part of the culture, does that qualify as blocking and tackling for the success of a practice or is that sort of external to it?
Eric Passon: Yeah. When we think of the, you know, the pillars of a high performing medical group, we culture and engagement is, is, is its own pillar for a reason. And an engagement is not just engaged. A lot of times we think of engagement as patient engagement with the practice itself, but it’s physician engagement.
Eric Passon: It’s staff engagement, um, that represent a culture of an organization, which is really something that’s, that’s tangible if you’re in front of it, but it’s not tangible in terms of a metric. Um, it’s a mindset and it stems, In most cases, based on leadership, physician leadership, administrative leadership, cultivating this culture, continuing to communicate, you know, what the purpose of the organization is and having people feel like they’re aligned to that purpose.
Eric Passon: 1 thing we, you know, 1 of the areas we work on [00:08:00] is physician compensation and, uh, you know, the predominant comp plan across the country is an RVU comp plan. Which, in essence, you know, pays you for how many, you know, visits or procedures that, that you do. Inherently, it feels fair because the more I work, the more I’m getting paid on a comp per RVU basis.
Eric Passon: But it’s very much, uh, a transactional. Eat what you kill type of model and, you know, if, if I pay you, you know, based on how many widgets you produce, that’s going to be the currency in which I feel like my self worth in the organization is tied to. And so that’s problematic when you’re trying to develop a patient centric culture within the organization or a culture that, hey, we’re all in this thing together.
Eric Passon: Um, and so, you know, cultivating that culture is strong physician leadership, having aligned incentives, [00:09:00] um, having an administrative team that, that is supporting you and you feel supported, um, from that perspective.
Erik Sunset: I want to put a bookmark in value based care in that discussion or that discourse around RDUs being the part of the incentive chain. But before we get there, what are some of the other pillars that drive successful operations?
Eric Passon: Well, we talked about culture, um, obviously operational excellence. So having the, you know, standards in place. For all the blocking and tackling things that I think we touched on before revenue cycle management, patient access, uh, the clinical workflows to, you know, do we have if if we go into one of our clinics.
Eric Passon: Uh, as a patient, do we have the same feeling when we go to a different clinic across town? Um, that’s a part of the same organization. Um, organizational leadership and management, uh, is a, is a key one, uh, where we have, [00:10:00] uh, a structure that allows for physician leadership to have a seat at the table for, for business decisions.
Eric Passon: And we have strong alignment from that perspective. Um, yeah. And some of the others are get into, you know, compliance, obviously, as you’re in health care, and as you’re working with medical groups, uh, being compliant across the board, not just HIPAA compliance, but we’ve got coding compliance and so forth is a pretty.
Eric Passon: Pretty important component of the model. Um, and then being transparent as it relates to, uh, reporting, for example, that we see with high performing medical groups, not many medical groups do this, but they’re unblinded and performance metrics. So, um, for, for those measures of success of the organization, uh, Dr.
Eric Passon: X and Dr. Y can see their, see each other’s performance and, and that helps to elevate, um, the, the [00:11:00] performance of the overall organization when you have that level of transparency. And it also signals that there’s, there’s no, or very limited special deals as a result. Um, and as soon as you have special deals happening outside of your existing structure.
Eric Passon: That sort of also, um, also sort of, uh, becomes disconnected from the purpose or, or from building the culture that you want, uh, within the organization.
Erik Sunset: So that, that, that gamification of performance, that’s kind of an outdated term now. I think transparency is better. I like leaderboard. Maybe I’m old fashioned. Just show me the leaderboard. I don’t need to gamify it. Where do I stand? Is that data that you’re able to get out of, say, a PM or EHR? Is that a dashboard that you provide?
Erik Sunset: Where does that come from? Because some, some of these softwares in use are much better than others at reporting and analytics.
Eric Passon: Yeah. Good question. And you would think in this day and age, we, there’s, there’s been so much advancements in [00:12:00] technology that it’s still really hard because of the number of different systems in place. to create a single source of truth. Alright, we, we see with many of our clients that, you know, if you run the report this way versus that way, you get different numbers.
Eric Passon: And then that sort of also impacts culture if you are transparent and the numbers aren’t accurate or they’re perceived not to be accurate. Um, and physicians are skeptical people. So they should, you know, they, they need to be vetted. The data should be vetted. So I think it starts with, do you have a single source of truth?
Eric Passon: Um, so your PM system, if you have third party claims data, if you have GL payroll, uh, scheduling, referral data, you know, is it all coming into a single source of truth? Do you have a structured cascading management reporting from the executive level all the way down to where your individual practices and individual physicians are all singing from the same sheet of music, which I’m making it [00:13:00] sound very easy, and it’s not.
Eric Passon: Um, to do that well, but I think that’s a, that’s a, that’s a strong starting place. Cause if you don’t have that single source of truth, and this is what we tell our clients is perception rules, you know, if I can, if I can poke holes in the data that you’re sharing or you’re, or there is no data and transparency within the organization, that I’m going to make up my version of the truth.
Eric Passon: Based on how I feel and what I see and touch from that perspective. And so really, you know, I think our greatest value is sort of sorting through, uh, and, and bridging that gap between perception and reality.
Erik Sunset: Yeah, how I feel versus this is what the data says are often very different. Very infrequently will those two things line up. I’m not sure I’m preaching to the choir there. So with the bookmark we put in RVUs and value based care, and to an extent culture, [00:14:00] if the ultimate is not generating as many RVUs as I possibly can, because that really doesn’t take into account quality of care.
Erik Sunset: That’s just a, you know, it’s a tally, it’s a number. Not to say that the care being provided isn’t great, but it’s just a bottom line type of exercise, maybe a top line type of exercise. So I guess let’s unpack this a little bit. Um, with regard to culture and a shift away from just a pure widget production line as you put it.
Erik Sunset: But RVUs are how we’re compensating positions. What’s the balancing act that’s in play?
Eric Passon: Yeah. So, so I think, and this is a question we get from our clients all the time. And I think we have a blog post that says, sorry, there is no magic formula. you know, our medical groups, health systems have been wrestling with physician comp since, uh, you know, since the beginning of time. And, and what that tells me is that, you know, [00:15:00] yes, if, if, if all I have is compensation and all I have is worked RV use, and I’ve got a transactional relationships relationship with my individual providers, and that’s a problem.
Eric Passon: And that’s disconnected from the mission statement on the website. I think what a lot of medical groups and health systems have an opportunity to do, uh, that is, that is much more hopeful and optimistic is that. Yeah. We, we have this ability right now to, to basically try to connect them back to that mission statement on the website.
Eric Passon: We have the ability to help them help educate our provider base around what financial sustainability means. Not just our views. I mean, production is important, right? We need we need access to care. We need to be able to see the community that we’re serving, but we also, to your point, need to provide high quality care.
Eric Passon: We need to be really intentional about what. Okay. Uh, setting they are in, uh, and, and can they be seen in an office or at home, or should it be an [00:16:00] ASC or a hospital and those decisions making those very intentionally. Um, it are all really important and so many times we get approached to to change the comp plan because physicians aren’t behaving the way they want them to be and most of the time it’s not a comp plan issue.
Eric Passon: It’s, it’s a leadership issue. It’s a transparency issue. It’s a culture issue. Um, and, and that many organizations should use this opportunity, especially now in this time of uncertainty to take a step back and affirm their purpose, help the, help the physicians, practice managers, understand their purpose, um, and, and, and work on, you know, aligning incentives and the blocking and tackling in a way that’s, you know, That’s more strategic in nature.
Eric Passon: A lot of these groups were formed out of necessity, right? Because it was tough to stay in private practice. [00:17:00] Then we moved on to, you know, now either Epic or Cerner EMRs for meaningful use purposes, and, you know, we’re, we’re typically, uh, many of our clients are, are living off of single digit margins, so they’re surviving the day, I think, I think it’s time for them to.
Eric Passon: To take a step back and say, Hey, we’ve built this amazing network of providers. How do we really think about using that network for a purpose that’s more aligned with? With our mission?
Erik Sunset: Well, without giving away the secret formula, how do you do it?
Eric Passon: The good question. Um, the there’s not a step by step guide. Unfortunately, and, um, for, uh, you know, the fact that similarly that there is no magic formula on the comp plan. I think each organization sort of in a different place of that journey. And [00:18:00] so, you know, depending on where they are. Step one, you know, is can everyone within the organization articulate the purpose of the medical group and in a way that’s consistent and makes sense?
Eric Passon: That’s pretty simple, right? You would think, oh, yeah, we understand the purpose of the medical group. You would be amazed that, uh, if, if I talked to the CEO of the medical group and the CMO and the CFO, and then. Uh, talk to a practice manager or a regional physician leader. I would probably get five or six different answers to that question.
Eric Passon: And so that’s a real simple place to start that doesn’t, yeah, it feels soft and it’s not, you know, it’s not about, you know, how much ROI we can generate or how much additional revenue we can generate. But it’s an important piece of that culture question that you Pressed on earlier.
Erik Sunset: Well, I think that makes sense. And it’s, you know, these things you can’t measure. It’s easy [00:19:00] to Cast aside and go, there’s no number that can be assigned to this. It’s, uh, it’s qualitative, not quantitative, but man, are they important? And you really only find out how important they are when you get them wrong.
Eric Passon: Yeah, the the there’s another thing that you made me think of. I think it was a survey by Gerard Around the growing distrust between physicians and administration. I think it was it was a statistic in there around, you know, six of six of ten physicians have a favorable view on unionization and when you peel some of that back Um, you, and you see some, some of this going on in particular in the Northeast and Boston, um, you peel some of that back.
Eric Passon: And yes, some of it’s related to burnout. Some of it’s related to the lack of staffing, but, but a lot of it is also related to this, this fear of losing autonomy, the lack of collaboration, the lack of [00:20:00] transparency. So, I’m not only, you know, there’s, there’s uncertainty in terms of regulatory uncertainty, but I also think.
Eric Passon: You know, by, by being aligned on your purpose as an organization and individuals within that organization, you, you end up mitigating these hidden risks that you’re not even thinking about, like unionization, for example.
Erik Sunset: Yeah, that, uh, that makes sense. I’ll have to find a link to that to get it into the show notes. I’m not sure I’ve seen that one myself, but I probably should have. We put a pin in value based care now for a while. I’m not sure how much there is to say. It kind of diverged from the initial intended talking point, but value based care is a very opaque term.
Erik Sunset: It can mean just like with the mission statement on a website, you could get a lot of different answers about what actually is value based care. Obviously, there’s implications moving from fee for service and the boatload of RVUs that get generated every day, week, month, and year. Uh, Value [00:21:00] Based Care takes a little bit different look at it though, depending on who you ask.
Erik Sunset: Uh, turning more towards patient outcomes and keeping folks as healthy as they possibly can be. Are you seeing any developments as we’re a month into 2025 now around value based care?
Eric Passon: It’s really, it’s really interesting you asked that question because I was telling a colleague recently how, how the tone around value based care, I want to say over the last six months, last year has, has completely changed. Um, we’ve been talking about, You know, prior to starting Ancore health, uh, eight years ago, I was part of the advisory board company.
Eric Passon: And I feel like, you know, I don’t know if it’s 10, 15, 20 years ago, we talked about the transition from volume to value. And it’s really dependent on market, but in certain markets, That are predominantly fee for service in my [00:22:00] conversations recently, it feels like we’re, we’re doubling down on fee for service.
Eric Passon: Not we, but the providers are, uh, the notion of value based care is, um, is met with a high degree of skepticism in terms of their ability to ever really move the needle and it’s blamed on a lot of different things. Um, in other markets, that’s different, right? Depending on the conditions or, or favorability, obviously, what’s going on on the West Coast versus East Coast of have been different for a number of years.
Eric Passon: I also think what’s happened to drive that is the changing coding regs, the V28, uh, change the change to V28 really, uh, put a hamper on making money from, uh, from coding, uh, optimizing coding. And so now the, the ability to make money is tied to reducing total cost of care, and certainly there’s opportunity [00:23:00] to, to better manage the, uh, better manage members, patients, uh, that have multiple chronic conditions and behavioral health conditions as well, uh, at the same time, I think, you know, the, the, the individual patient and consumer, uh, Uh, the door that hasn’t been completely unlocked is how do we empower the consumer to manage their own individual health, which I do also do not have answers for.
Eric Passon: I apologize. But I think that’s really the next step that hopefully will go as a society. Um, and, and really start focusing on value based care initiatives that, that truly bend the cost curve, uh, that truly, you know, meet the goals of, of the triple aim. Um, and now we’re sort of moving beyond just coding as a, as a way of, of earning dollars.
Erik Sunset: [00:24:00] That, that patient accountability piece, the, the providers that I’ve had on this show, our clients, they, uh, they don’t all say the same thing, but you know, I will do everything I can to make sure this patient gets a great health outcome. But if they’re making poor diet choices, poor lifestyle choices, Continuing to smoke.
Erik Sunset: I mean, all of these are low hanging fruit examples, but the providers that I’ve spoken to about this, I can’t, I can do everything possible to change that behavior, but most of the time it doesn’t change. People come to me for a quick fix. Won’t put in the work, whether it’s. You know, something as easy as diet and exercise, which maybe isn’t necessarily easy, but that’s a choice that’s made every day.
Erik Sunset: That seems like a big barrier to value based care when the providers are unable to change behavior for somebody that’s, you know, on the path to dying and early death.
Eric Passon: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s not, you know, at least within our company, you know, I wish I could wave a magic wand and solve that particular issue, but it’s all the more [00:25:00] reason, um, is, is the, the, the quick, the, the quick ways of making money in the past are no longer there, right? There, there’s only these more challenging ways, uh, of, of being financially sustainable, which means going back to where we started, focus on the fundamentals.
Eric Passon: We need to collect. The money we’re owed. We need to provide access to patients in the community that are taken that in some cases could be taking months before they can make an appointment. Solving those issues are really important because, you know, if we’re not seeing the patients, if we’re not being proactive around that engagement for those that want to be engaged.
Eric Passon: Um, you know, it’s going to be challenging to, to get beyond where we are today.
Erik Sunset: Well, and with that, that in mind, that brings us back on track here through the lens of 2025 new year, a lot of new things happening. Are there any unique twists this year that your high performing [00:26:00] clients you’re looking at? For those fundamentals that maybe hadn’t been so obvious in the past,
Eric Passon: I think it’s interesting. I think what’s, what’s, what’s old is new. Again, the, the, uh, you know, we talked about those pillars of a high performing medical group. There’s really, when I, when I see the change this year from, from what they were back in the advisory board days, there were these things called gold books.
Eric Passon: And they contained a lot of really interesting research from from different providers across the country. A lot of those same fundamental elements are are still. You know, still attributes of a high performing medical group, strong physician leadership, the culture engagement we talked about, you know, having a single source of truth, uh, transparency, those sort of things what’s different now, I think, is the, is the advancements in technology in particular AI and we’re, I’m [00:27:00] not going to profess to be an AI expert.
Eric Passon: Um, beyond using chat GPT, but I do think because, because of the headwinds that I see from a reimbursement perspective, like the physician fee schedule, or what we talked about before about, you know, cost of living in certain markets are are astronomical, then how do we find efficiencies within the practice?
Eric Passon: Um, and really staying on the administrative side, I don’t want to wade into the clinical decision making, because I think that’s a whole nother topic of conversation that’s going to have, you know, more increased scrutiny and, and, uh, in regulation associated with it. But I would encourage every practice to look through work for workflow by workflow.
Eric Passon: How could we use technology in particular AI to streamline the process to have our people work at top of license? And I think. I think what you’ll see is there’s a lot of things that we can be doing [00:28:00] more efficiently that, that, that’s not replacing all this labor costs because a lot of practices we work with are actually understaffed.
Eric Passon: So it’s really helping them be more efficient. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s helping to speed up the, the communication with, with patients in particular. And drive access, right? We can maybe we can see more more patients as a result of of of having access to ambient a type technology ambient AI technology. And now now physicians are able to leverage that innovation.
Eric Passon: So they can be more present with the patient as 1 example. The thing with AI is it’s just there’s so many examples. There’s so many different workflows. So that’s why I think taking a more deliberate approach around that makes a lot of sense. But I, I think that whether it’s 2025 or over the next 3 to 5 years.
Eric Passon: I think whether it’s AI or, or other forms of technology, [00:29:00] finding ways to be more efficient is going to be really important. Um, especially as you have a new age of physicians wanting work life balance, you know, uh, maybe doesn’t, you know, want to be at 20 percent above the 90th percentile of RVUs. And so how do we continue to, to, to drive efficiency within our practices too?
Eric Passon: Um, you know, to be able to take care of the patients that need to be taken care of.
Erik Sunset: that’s that’s really well put. And this is a little bit of a philosophical point. But when you look at physicians, the C suite, if it’s a big health care organization, administrators, nurses, MAs, everybody from top to bottom. Has a smartphone, you know, I, I bet the house on that everybody’s got a smartphone, not that maybe an iPhone or an Android is the height of technology use, but smart TVs that you have apps on, everybody knows how to get an Amazon Prime subscription.
Erik Sunset: It’s not that it’s resistance to [00:30:00] technology. And certainly there’s a factor of being snake bitten by the legacy EHRs. And that’s, that was my background. I don’t know if we’ve talked about that before recording, but I’m very well versed. There was some really bad software out there, very expensive. And then on top of that, the government is telling you you’re going to use it or be reimbursed less.
Erik Sunset: That’s not a formula for success. But when you look at these workflows, still doing manual fax. Still handing things off three or four times to two or three different people to be processed. And I just heard a horror story, uh, from a good friend on the West Coast, that they have a single staff member who is both chasing down charts for completion and verifying insurance and at a tremendous, tremendous cost.
Erik Sunset: Uh, there’s no throughput on either factor as you would expect one person, uh, doing both of these jobs. So the philosophical point is, is that you’re surrounded by technology throughout the rest of your life, but then you’re relegating yourself to these tragedies of [00:31:00] workflows at work. What’s going on?
Eric Passon: Yeah, I think it’s, I think there’s always in healthcare, there’s resistance to change in general. I think culturally is a, as a healthcare, um, I don’t know, industry, if you will. You know, there’s so many providers that basically they want to know what, what another provider is doing. I know we’ll do that thing because they’re doing it.
Eric Passon: So it must be right. And, and that’s where I go back to the fact that each Each organization is unique. It’s got its own purpose, has its own, yeah, there’s similarities in terms of systems and so forth. But even systems, you could be on the same system, could be set up completely differently. And we see that when it comes to the backend data.
Eric Passon: Piece of it. It’s like that’s that’s great. We understand how to extract data out of one system. But, you know, each client is such a such a unique [00:32:00] setup. And so I think it goes back to, um, that leadership question. And do we have, uh, an organization that is, um, has a culture for change or not? And we, we often talk about not to keep using buzzwords, but, uh, Um, that, that you have to move at the speed of trust and so figuring out what that right speed is, um, is important, but embracing these changes.
Eric Passon: I think communicating them in a way that’s not, we’re not replacing how you deliver care. We’re not, this isn’t about reducing our, our staff, uh, by hundreds of people. This is just about working at top of license. So that person that you are describing can be focused on the outliers. Were the things that, that may be coming ahead and not focused on, you know, how do I do all these manual tasks, uh, from a week ago?
Eric Passon: Um, and just, you know, working smarter, not harder.[00:33:00]
Erik Sunset: Well, there, there seems to be a willingness to embrace AI, unlike any other health IT previously brought to market. And it’s a kind of a cruel twist of fate that a lot of these workflows were available to you in the pre AI days, but there was a fear, Oh, we don’t really want to. Let any of our staff go.
Erik Sunset: We’re happy with all of our FTEs. Like, is this going to cost so and so their job? Like, no, thanks. We’ll think about it. But the cruel twist of fate is now like in your example, we’re understaffed, but we’re still doing things manually, but there’s an even better digital solution available for it. So I’m, I’m seeing that people are, or healthcare organizations are much more willing to at least have the conversation around that change, but the speed of trust is a really.
Erik Sunset: A good way to frame it.
Eric Passon: Yeah. Yeah. It should be improving culture, like the ambient AI technology. The technology should be helping to improve culture, improve efficiency. Maybe we don’t, maybe it’s not about, you know, letting a bunch of people go, [00:34:00] but maybe we don’t have to grow our labor force as much as we think we need to do, because, you know, we’re, we’re leveraging technology in a smarter way.
Eric Passon: I think, I think the, the, the path of least resistance is definitely going to be more on the administrative side. Of healthcare that like I mentioned before I think the clinical side I understand why Organizations would move with caution around anything dealing with clinical care um, but even in those situations, there’s there’s ways of using ai not to make the ultimate decision, but to You know improve the quality of life Uh for for the providers.
Erik Sunset: Wow, that’s really well put. Before we wrap up, Eric, is there anything we glossed over or anything we didn’t cover that we should have?
Eric Passon: I don’t know we we talked about a lot. Um, Yeah, I think I think there’s I guess, from my perspective, [00:35:00] I’m filled with hope around what the future looks like. There’s, I feel like at times you can, especially as a consultant, right? You, you. We’re often brought into crisis situations or when the sky is falling and we need help.
Eric Passon: What’s really exciting right now is the work that we’re doing is for organizations, not only that are in those crisis situations, but also organizations that are having some of their best fiscal years. And they’re taking a step back to say, how can we do that? How can we reimagine our employee medical group for good?
Eric Passon: And there’s, to me, what’s different now than the late nineties, uh, when health systems back then were in the employment business, and then they got out of the business and now they’re back into the business is that they, they have a shot right now to take this network of physicians that they employ, um, and really [00:36:00] align them more closely to, to their secret weapon, which.
Eric Passon: Is the mission statement on the website. So we’re really excited to work with health systems that want to think differently, independent medical groups, corporate entities that employ physicians that want to think differently. And we think there’s, there’s an amazing opportunity to not only recruit and retain high quality providers and staff, but in a way that, you know, aligns them to the organization and having a shared sense of purpose.
Erik Sunset: Wow, I’m gonna have a hard time building on that statement. That, uh, that was awesome. So for these health systems, uh, corporations, listeners in general that would want to get in touch with you, how can they do it? Are you big on any social medias? Website? Where can folks find
Eric Passon: Yeah. Uh, I personally am not, but our marketing people are, and it’s, it’s mainly LinkedIn is our main channel. Uh, I think we’re, we’re on Instagram as well. [00:37:00] Um, but mainly LinkedIn, and then you could obviously go to our website, Ancorehealth.com, uh, to find out more information,
Erik Sunset: We’ll get links to all those destinations into the show notes. Eric, thanks so much for joining us.
Eric Passon: Eric, thank you for your time and I appreciate you having me on. That was a fun discussion.
Erik Sunset: Absolutely. My pleasure. And on behalf of the entire DocBuddy team, I want to thank you for listening. Be sure you’re subscribed on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. So you always get the newest episodes of the show. And until next time, I’m your host, Eric. Talk soon.