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Navigate the NC Legislative Landscape Friday General Session Announced
Join political analyst Joe Stewart for a comprehensive update on North Carolina’s legislative landscape. From recent election developments to shifts in healthcare policies, this session will equip you with the latest insights to effectively navigate advocacy efforts for your practice. Gain valuable strategies and actionable advice to stay informed and make an impact on the future of healthcare in North Carolina.
The early bird registration discount has been extended so sign up today!
Experience Internet celebrity Judson Laipply, reporting expert Aaron Newcomer, Emmy Award winner Sharon Delaney McCloud, healthcare futurist Stephanie Wierwille, ACMPE guru Michelle Wallace, and political analyst Joe Stewart. Learn more about the speakers and sessions here.
Innovative Products and Services
The exhibit hall is sold out! Get essential one-on-one conversations in the exhibit hall with the companies driving practice management innovation and efficiency. From IT to collections to linens, get the information you need to optimize your practice. Meet our Annual Conference speakers here.
Sign Up to Join Us Today
Full conference costs start at $475 for members and again this year we are offering a single-day pass starting at $275 for members. See all of our conference pricing here. To register today, please follow the online registration link below.
We are past our discount room block cutoff for the Embassy Suites and Aloft Wilmington. There are plenty of options for alternate lodging in downtown Wilmington. To start exploring hotel options, follow the button link below.
The NCMGMA Medical Employee Salary & Benefits Online Survey data, collected from 2023 practice metrics, is designed to bring you the information you need to see trends specific to the healthcare industry, and provide comparative information your organization can use to assist in making crucial business decisions.
The cost is $400 for NCMGMA members and $600 for non-members. To purchase your data access, please follow the link below.
Our membership is growing! Here’s the list of healthcare professionals and students who have recently joined NCMGMA (March 22, 2024, through April 10, 2024):
Active
Erin Bell, Horizon Family Medicine, Clayton, NC
Kayla Bowman, Digestive Health Specialists, PA, Winston-Salem, NC
Linda King, Viewmont Optometry PLLC, Hickory, NC
Julie Liles, Privia Health LLC, Charlotte, NC
Stephen Walters, Carolina Arthritis, Wilmington, NC
Affiliate
Mike Halsema, Med Practice Insights, Matthews, NC
Steve Cox, Read’s Uniforms, Charlotte, NC
Student
Tyra Bethea, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC
Dennis White, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC
We’re excited to have another successful Master Class under out belts. Last Thursday and Friday, Wally Schmader and Tracy Spears of the Exceptional Leaders Lab led practice managers through their proven playbook of actionable tactics and strategies for achieving more impactful and successful leadership.
Thank you to all the practice managers who took time out of their busy schedules to join us last week. Thank you to Wally and Tracy, thank you to our sponsors Curi, HandCraft and Sentinel; and thank you to the Beaufort Hotel for hosting this essential gathering of healthcare leaders.
Upcoming Events
Annual Conference May 15-17, 2024 Wilmington Convention Center, Wilmington, NC Enjoy continuing education from healthcare’s thought leaders, essential networking with peers and old friends, and our industry’s best products and services. Learn More and Register Today!
Advocacy Days June 11-12, 2024 Raleigh, NC Gain vital legislative updates from key decision makers and players within North Carolina and meet with our legislators on healthcare hot topics. Registration coming this spring.
Washington Trip July 23-26, 2024 Washington, DC Experience our nation’s capital while gaining access to key policy makers and advocating for local issues important to North Carolina’s healthcare industry. More information coming soon!
Fall Conference September 25-27, 2024 Benton Convention Center, Winston-Salem, NC Get practice management-specific continuing education, our industry’s best products and services, and plenty of social and networking opportunities. Registration coming spring 2024.
Click here to see all state and local chapter events.
Be in the center of the action! From receptions to networking to prize drawings, the exhibit hall is the center of Annual Conference activity. And don’t forget the numerous aisles of exhibitor booths, displaying healthcare’s leading products and services from our 2024 Alliance sponsors.
Visit our exhibitor page here and see why the exhibit hall is a must-see part of the Annual Conference experience!
Join us in Wilmington and experience Internet celebrity Judson Laipply, Emmy Award winner Sharon Delaney McCloud, reporting expert Aaron Newcomer, ACMPE guru Michelle Wallace, and healthcare futurist Stephanie Wierwille. Learn more about the Annual Conference speakers and sessions here.
Make Your Hotel Accommodations
The Embassy Suites is our host hotel with rates starting at $209 per night. We’re also offering rooms at Aloft Wilmington starting at $199 per night. Visit the Annual Conference page here for complete hotel booking details. The NCMGMA room block discount cutoff is April 24th.
Sign Up to Join Us Today
Full conference costs start at $475 for members and again this year we are offering a single-day pass starting at $275 for members. See all of our conference pricing here. To register today, please follow the online registration link below.
2024 Alliance sponsor feature article courtesy of Privia Health
Office managers play a pivotal role in guiding practices’ day-to-day operations as well as long-term strategy. Today’s private-practice administrators, however, face an array of complex challenges:
Attracting and retaining talent amid inflation and staffing shortages
Remaining financially viable while maximizing autonomy
Offering convenient tech tools to engage patients
This episode of The Break Room, the podcast by Privia Health, explores solutions to those common obstacles with Mike Gebel, CEO of McIntosh Clinic, a multispecialty practice located in Thomasville, Georgia. Gebel also serves as the President of the Georgia chapter of the MGMA, which unites a diverse array of medical practice managers to drive advocacy, education, and patient-focused care.
This excerpt of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode below and find us on Apple Podcasts, PodBean, or your preferred platform.
How Top-Tier Office Managers Optimize Profits, Physician Workloads, and Patient Satisfaction Hear Mike Gebel, CEO of McIntosh Clinic, a multispecialty practice in Georgia, and President of the Georgia chapter of the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), discuss how a partnership can help private practices thrive amid staffing shortages, the volume-to-value transition, and rampant consolidation. Click here to listen
The Break Room: What is one of the most urgent, complex challenges private practices face today? And how can Office Managers and Practice Administrators help solve it?
Mike Gebel: We’re a 30-year-old practice that was started by a group of individuals across multiple specialties. As of today, I have one of the founding original members left. So, we are definitely staring at the graying of the physician population. So, what can we do to recruit new talent? How can we prepare an offer or a set of benefits to entice younger physicians?
One of the issues we face from a recruiting perspective is being a practice where the physicians are the business owners versus employed by a hospital or large health group. We don’t traditionally have the deep pockets to match their contracts, so what we try to do is create an offer that creates interest among physicians. So far, that approach has been successful, thank goodness, because that benefits package is partially funded by our success in value-based care. I have internal medicine physicians who work four and a half days a week, 48 weeks or so a year, and whose take-home pay is in the top 5 percent for their specialty.
The Break Room: To really thrive in both value-based and fee-for-service care, it’s incredibly helpful to have the support and resources of an experienced partner. What were your criteria for — and benefits of — a partnership?
Mike Gebel: We resisted the idea of something like Privia for a long time. We were in a Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) with a group a few hours north. “This is easy,” we thought. “We can do it ourselves.” After a couple of years, we quickly disabused ourselves of that notion. You can absolutely do it, but I don’t think you can do it well. Working with our board of directors to really look at the long-term viability of the clinic, we realized that to succeed, we’d need to partner with like-minded private practices that share similar goals, beliefs, and approaches to medicine.
That’s where we’ve really leveraged our relationship with Privia. Value-based care churns out data in amounts that are like, jokingly, drinking from a firehose. You just can’t do it. You need somebody to help you organize all that data into something that makes sense and is actionable. That was part of what ruined us in our previous MSSP arrangement. We had all of the data, but I couldn’t begin to tell you where to start. So Privia’s resources allow us to take a targeted look at things that actually make a difference.
What makes having a foot in both worlds (or, rather, mostly in the fee-for-service world while we start to put a foot into the value-based-care world) difficult are the models’ different challenges and skill sets. On the fee-for-service side, Privia helps with online scheduling to ensure we’re maximizing our schedule density, and by offering tools like CODER+ to remove some of the tedious box-checking from physicians’ processes and free them up to do more physician-based tasks. And then there’s your revenue cycle management team to proactively notify us about changes so we aren’t playing ping-pong with payers and sending a claim back and forth six times.
All of that support improves our efficiency. The more efficient I can be, the more streamlined a business I can run, which then decreases overhead, which then allows the physician owners to take home more money at the end of the year, which in turn makes for happier doctors, which is what I’m here to do.
Annual Conference Curi Welcome Reception May 15 | Battleship North Carolina
Kick off your Annual Conference experience with an evening on the deck of the Battleship North Carolina. Water taxis will shuttle guests to and from the Battleship. Sponsored by Curi, enjoy dinner, drinks and entertainment, as well as networking with old friends and new!
Learn more about the Annual Conference here and secure your spot today at the button link below.
Administrator of the Year AwardDeadline is March 22nd
Each year, NCMGMA and Curi recognize a healthcare administrator, affiliated with the NCMGMA, who has exhibited exceptional leadership management proficiency and enhanced the effectiveness of healthcare delivery in his/her practice and community through recent, noteworthy achievements. To make a nomination today, clickhere.
Meet Our Annual Conference Speakers
Join us in Wilmington and experience Internet celebrity Judson Laipply, Emmy Award winner Sharon Delaney McCloud, reporting expert Aaron Newcomer, ACMPE guru Michelle Wallace, and healthcare futurist Stephanie Wierwille. Learn more about the Annual Conference speakers and sessions here.
Make Your Hotel Accommodations
The Embassy Suites is our host hotel with rates starting at $209 per night. We’re also offering rooms at Aloft Wilmington starting at $199 per night. Visit the Annual Conference page here for complete hotel booking details. The NCMGMA room block discount cutoff is April 24th.
Sign Up to Join Us Today
Full conference costs start at $475 for members and again this year we are offering a single-day pass starting at $275 for members. See all of our conference pricing here. To register today, please follow the online registration link below.
Our membership continues to grow! Take a look at the list of healthcare professionals who have recently joined NCMGMA (February 23, 2024, through March 13, 2024):
Active
Barbie Cooper, Dosher Memorial Hospital. Southport, NC
Thomas McCaskill, Carolina Eye Associates, P.A., Southern Pines, NC
Ada Okwara, American Family Care Urgent Care, Charlotte, NC
Cooper Scurry, Cooper Scurry Facial Plastic Surgery Center, PLLC, Winston Salem, NC
Julie Sylvestre, Grey Ledge Medical Management, Southport, NC
Affiliate
Peggy Bragg, Medical Billing Partners, LLC, Raleigh, NC
March Lunch & Learn Webinar NCMGMA Medical Employee Salary & Benefits Survey Review
Thursday, March 28 | 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST | Zoom
Data Matters. Join us on Thursday, March 28th to hear Tracey Martin, Partner and CPA with Bernard Robinson & Company (BRC), detail 2023’s North Carolina-specific NCMGMA Medical Employee Salary & Benefits Survey highlights. Tracey will address important KPIs and year-over-year salary trends.
It is essential healthcare practices review their complete compensation package annually (wages, salaries, benefits) to help attract and retain exceptional employees. By ensuring market-based competitiveness and maintaining internal equity, practices are more likely to retain their valued employees. Due to the unprecedented impact of COVID-19, healthcare practices continue to witness shifts in historical compensation practices.
During this webinar participants will:
Hear the current state of healthcare compensation within North Carolina.
Learn to use survey data to update and validate current compensation/recruitment practices for the following areas:
Salary Administration.
Nursing.
Benefits.
Office Staff.
Laboratory and Radiology.
Hear additional KPIs and year-over-year trends based on data gathered through NCMGMA’s highly respected annual Medical Employee Salary & Benefits Survey.
Webinar Speaker
Tracey Martin Partner and CPA, BRC Tracey is a partner and CPA in the Wilmington office of BRC. She applies her knowledge and practical ideas to meet client needs from both a business and tax perspective. Tracey works primarily with medical practices, professional service groups and high net worth individuals. She also leads BRC’s client accounting service line, focusing on providing outsourced accounting and CFO advisory services to clients.
Registration
This webinar is free but you must be registered to attend. Space is limited so register early! After you register, you will receive an emailed confirmation with webinar and phone-in instructions. Please check your spam/junk folder if you do not see the confirmation email after you register.
Continuing education credit may be granted through your professional organization (MGMA, PAHCOM, AHIMA, etc.). Please self-submit for these organizations.
Questions
For questions or more information please contact the NCMGMA offices at info@ncmgm.org.
The conference committee is excitedly planning the few remaining details of the Annual Conference in Wilmington. One of our speakers, Sharon Delaney McCloud, will be touching on retention and staff professional development and is asking for our help.
Please take the quick survey at the button link below (shouldn’t take longer than 2 minutes!) to provide Sharon with some valuable insight into the world of our NC practices. Thank you for your time!
If you haven’t yet registered for the Annual Conference, we hope you’ll make plans to join us May 15-17 in Wilmington. You can click here to learn more and register.
North Carolina Medical Group Management Association Blog 