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American Medical Administrators – A Fully Integrated Healthcare System Offering Providers Better Resources and Support to Increase Healthcare Quality for Patients
Jonathan Loutzenhiser
CEO
American Medical Administrators, Inc.
https://www.amadministrators.com/
Interview conducted by:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFO Magazine
Published – October 23, 2023
CEOCFO: Mr. Loutzenhiser, what is American Medical Administrators?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: American Medical Administrators is a fully integrated healthcare system that is committed to offering our providers better resources and support to increase the quality of healthcare for our patient population.
CEOCFO: How do you do that; what is involved when an organization joins with you?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: We focus on independent primary care physicians who are entrepreneurs. These physicians often are running excellent businesses within our sector where they are lacking the resources needed to optimizing growth and patient care. For example, we can provide HR, marketing resources, PR resources, and even additional staff. I think they are looking directly for resources within those sectors such as payroll resources, public relations, marketing and accounting resources. This is where we quickly add value.
As we acquire physicians, we will help identify and provide additional staff, additional MA, and additional nurses. We seek to give our physicians the ability to focus on the patient instead of having to focus on running the business. We bring the business platform; they utilize that platform to be able to focus on what they do very well, which is patient care. Offering them additional staff and back-
CEOCFO: How does that come into play with the medical record systems doctors have today?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: We acquire everything in a very secure system. We integrate the physician into one system for ease of function for primary care physicians. Our providers are often a patient’s primary care provider throughout their life. With our primary care process, providers have had that patient base that they have built and serviced for quite some time. We integrate them into one system, one billing and collections process, one coverage group, and that allows better rates and is ultimately more efficient in terms of being able to value or evaluate the data collected.
CEOCFO: What do you understand on a basic level to accomplish ease of use for both physicians' practice and ease of use for the patient when they are interacting?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: By integrating all of these practices, whether a small practice or large practice, adding new technologies often becomes like climbing a mountain. When making a change to a business where the physician is hands-
CEOCFO: Why is it so hard to get the technology right on simple things?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: I believe it is pretty simple when you break it down. There are two main ecosystems in medicine. First, you have large hospitals that put a ton of staff on the top line, and they support that staff and the building. To move something that big is very difficult for them in terms of making changes. Then you have the over-
CEOCFO: How do you reach out to doctors or are they turning to AMAdministrators?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: Right now, we are launching in a few different regions, such as Missouri and Georgia, with plans for further expansion. We have key opinion leaders and excited, independent doctors. For example, Dr. James Poindexter is a vascular physician who built the Independent Practice Association from the 1990s through the 2000s. He then went in trying to address things and built an ACO. By bringing forward thinking physicians, Dr. Abdullah Arshad, MD, stepped in as our COO. They have been leading entrepreneurs and they want to address the problems we are speaking about in the healthcare sphere. By creating a platform that made sense to the physicians, we have been able to grow organically. We have physician partners with whom we have built strong relationships. In turn, those relationships are utilized to grow our mission, and the individuals they have historically known, who trust our physicians and know that they want the best for healthcare, believe in building and maintaining autonomy in how they practice medicine. We are not doctors; we are here to give resources and help create efficiency for the doctors. Our physician partners are truly the ones who open the door and bring a lot of value to our growth. In addition to our physicians, we have executives in our organization like Nick DeStefane with a deep passion for bettering healthcare and a wealth of experience and knowledge about the business side of the industry. Having non-
CEOCFO: How do you help a doctor overcome the fear of giving up control?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: I believe it is about speaking their language and building trust through actions. I believe consistency of action speaks directly to them and the problems at hand. With the community we are building, the common denominator is our core values. We believe in healthcare equity. We want to treat patients all across the nation and create efficiencies. When you have physicians, partners, and friends you have worked with, who have been persistent, straightforward, and acted with integrity, they are starting to come to us. We follow through on what we say we are going to do.
CEOCFO: What has changed in your approach as you have grown; what do you do differently today?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: Listening, team-
With entrepreneurship in my background, there was a desire for consistent growth. You could get things done and build and finish them yourself. In this, it is all about my team. I think about my operators, my development team, and the doctors, and then what it truly comes down to is how I can affect patient care. I am not a physician; I am here to serve the people I work for and with. I do that by making critical decisions when bringing people into the group. There may be doctors who have wonderful practices that do not make sense. It is about just stepping back and making decisions as thoughtfully as possible. It is about values and what we are trying to accomplish.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us about some of the other services available?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: When I talk about technology, one thing we do is put our physicians under one tax ID within a region for our physician groups. By doing that, we can have an integrated system. We make sure that we have a pharmacy, lab, durable medical equipment, all of it in one system similar to a Kaiser. By having that in one system, that is how we prepare for the problems we just spoke about. We want everything in one system so that technology can communicate and it can all be held within a cloud.
CEOCFO: How is business?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: It is overwhelming right now. I am proud to see the growth and the teams we are building. When you look at our pipelines for growth and the patients that are coming into our system, it is wonderful. I do not believe that we imagined the reaction that we would have. We just went into it with the mindset of having strong core values, integrity, and solving problems. One of those problems was communicating with the patient in terms of the whole system. The reaction of these independent physicians has been humbling. You see they want to solve the same problems; they want to be in a system where they trust the individuals will follow through with what they say. I am proud of my team.
CEOCFO: What is involved in the integration?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: Getting a physician integrated is going to start with negotiating the contract details on the front end. This is your legal contracts and agreements and other formalities that take place with what was agreed on between our group and that physician to secure the practice. We will send in a member of our operations team led by Dr. Arshad to begin the process. Our knowledgeable staff is used to import efficiencies learned over many years of experience. With each change in their process, we assign a team to that process. When we are looking at what we are going to do in upgrading their building that could take six or twelve months. Hiring a staffing team could take sixty to ninety days depending on where they are located and what staff they are adding. We are trying to create a better experience for the patient. Right now, it is about sending in the right teams to integrate the system.
CEOCFO: What might you look at about a particular practice that most knowledgeable people don't recognize should be in the mix?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: I did not realize the long hours that these wonderful doctors were working. When they are running a practice, what they want to do is practice medicine. The money is not what it used to be when you talk to physicians who have had a long career. They are often not independent because of the economics; they are independent because they truly believe that they want to give their patients the best care. So realizing the regulatory risks, the changes in oversight in terms of healthcare, to see that they have withstood these different storms that they have been through because they truly want to practice quality medicine without administrators telling them how to practice. I find them fiercely stubborn, fiercely entrepreneurial, and some of the hardest workers that I have ever met. When you see the time, they put in to make it successful, they truly have a heart for their patients and they want the best for them. When I speak of values, that is what I mean.
Even amid difficult changes and complex regulatory environments, these independent physicians that we work with, as well as doctors across the nation in hospitals, truly love their patients. That is one thing I do not think comes across to people because we do not realize the after-
CEOCFO: Lots of new ideas to look at; why pay attention to American Medical Administrators?
Mr. Loutzenhiser: Our values, our team, the people that genuinely love their patients. It is a mix of wonderful businessmen with doctors who are setting out to create a positive change for medicine in the US. A lot of them do not need to do this, they want to do this. They want to accomplish, create, and have better efficiency using technology and integrated systems. We are building something with positive momentum that, I believe, is going to provide a better avenue of access and streamlined care in medicine. It is something that I am proud of and believe will bring people a sense of healthcare security that they desire.
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