Zeyad Baker, President & CEO of ProHEALTH
Below is an excerpt of the full interview conducted with Zeyad Baker. Download the PDF now for the full article.
Zeyad, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. To start, I’d be curious to hear a little bit about your background.
I’m a pediatrician by training. I started a practice, Riverside Medical Group, alongside my brother who has a background in primary care. We acquired a practice and turned it into a group with 110 doctors at 40 locations. We sold it to Optum in June 2016 and then in the third quarter of 2018, Optum called and asked if I could help them run a practice that they acquired in 2014, which was ProHEALTH, and had over 1,000 clinicians.
When I hear that you guys at Scale are helping private groups achieve scale and success in an environment where it’s not easy, where most of the scaling is on the hospital and non-for-profit side, I think that’s a beautiful thing.
What precipitated the move from clinical care to management? Describe the transition.
It happened organically. I wasn’t one of those guys who after seven years of practicing decided I’d had enough. I love my work and taking care of kids, I find that the opposite of work. What happened was, we saw an opportunity in the marketplace to scale: On the one hand, our practice was growing due to our patients receiving better care, through greater access and referral management, on the other side, we noticed that a lot of doctors needed a home, because every doctor was saying, “I’m getting paid less, expenses are higher, so soon I’m going to be forced to work for a hospital system.” So, we thought, let’s fix the consumer problem as we see it, which can be solved through scale, and let’s solve the physician problem by giving them an alternative to the hospital – an independent practice model. And once you start growing quickly, as we did at Riverside, it becomes difficult to do a really good job overseeing the business if you see patients, and so it became necessary to spend more and more of my time on the management side. For a while I would continue seeing patients seven days a week, from 6:00 AM to 8:30 AM before rounds, but that became difficult, as often patients and their families want the flexibility of afternoon and evening visits and eventually I decided I couldn’t keep the standards I wanted to maintain as a pediatrician, only being available in the mornings.
The other thing I came to terms with, is the concept that if I could be a business leader and help 1,000 doctors be better, then I’m affecting a million patients, not just my panel of 2,000.
