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Community Care Physicians, P.C. (CCP) is growing in response to the demand of consumers and current trends in the healthcare industry. The Business Review wrote a piece on Community Care, recognizing the benefits of membership for both the independent provider and the patient.
Community Care is expanding primarily as a result of “greater demand among current patients”, said Dr. Shirish Parikh, CEO of Community Care. “As the population ages, the need for health care increases.”
This medical group offers a continuum of care. By offering thirteen specialty services in addition to primary care, patients are able to be referred within the CCP network and remain under the care of a quality organization they can trust.
Moreover, patients desire close and convenient health care. The need for accessible care is in high demand. Patients are frustrated with limited access to health care services when they need them the most. Community Care Physicians has responded to these trends. Some CCP offices are offering extended convenient care hours for non-emergent services to walk-in patients. Furthermore, the Urgent Care Center in Latham offers medical care after normal business hours, weekends, and holidays.
The developments in the healthcare industry are affecting individual practitioners as well. They are forced to become more business-savvy. Information technology, contracts with insurance companies, and privacy regulations all distract individual providers from practicing medicine. According to Dr. Parikh, the pressures of running a small practice can interfere with practicing medicine.
These changes compel practitioners to renounce their autonomy and join a larger medical group like Community Care. Within CCP there is a centralized administrative staff that focuses on the business aspect of healthcare so physicians can focus on taking care of patients.
The Business Review reported further to explain that “there are marketing benefits to being part of a group with a well-known name, and consolidating offices can help reduce overhead.”
In a time when patients are creating their own personal health accounts online and practices are adopting electronic medical records for their patients, health care has taken a turn into an expensive age of information technology.
Some of the cost of technology can be deferred if an individual provider joins Community Care. “EMR can be cost-prohibitive for the solo practitioner,” said Dr. Parikh. “It is not just the software and the licensing and the IT support, but the hardware has to be changed every two or three years.”
Change is inevitable in healthcare. Community Care Physicians has embraced this landscape and responded to demands in the industry. By offering benefits to autonomous providers and increasing the ease of care for patients, Community Care Physicians has been able to expand in size and improve quality of health care.
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