Doctor’s Medical Practices

A USA based corporation embarked upon a campaign of acquiring doctors’ practices. The timing of the acquisitions was such that practices in three states were integrated simultaneously.

Integration

The objective was to maintain the business continuity of the practices, with a long-term strategy of migrating all clinical and business operations to the same IT systems. Each practice was assessed to understand how they operate and what technology was being used. A separate integration plan was created for each practice that either immediately migrated to the new configuration, or kept on legacy systems for an extended period, or a mixture of migration and legacy. The legacy systems were eventually sunset and replaced, a long time after the rest of the integration was completed.

To achieve cost-saving synergies, all purchasing was centralized. However, as the practices were in different states, vendors had different Sales teams assigned to each practice. The problem for vendors was that they needed to compensate their Sales teams appropriately for their products sold. The integration team worked with the vendors to solve this, by creating custom reports for the vendors that identified which products were shipped to which locations. This allowed the vendor to compensate their Sales teams appropriately.

It was found that after the integration was to be completed, there were going to be some overlaps and hence redundancy in roles, and some skill shortages in other roles. An integration objective was to not force any employees to leave the business, so all employees’ career achievements and career objectives were reviewed to see which employees could be reassigned to new roles. These employees were re-trained in new areas where there was a skill shortage and given new career paths.