A poll conducted earlier this year by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that Americans have a significantly higher level of trust in physicians and nurses than in public health institutions and agencies. When it comes to recommendations for improving health, 67% of respondents said they trust physicians a great deal / quite a lot, while only 41% had the same feeling about their state and local health departments.

Those findings make sense. Front-line healthcare providers, who diagnose and treat patients every day, are in a much better position to understand and address patient needs. When physicians’ ability to make autonomous clinical decisions is taken away, patient care suffers, and trust is eroded.

Source: Network-wide survey of QualDerm affiliated practices’ patients; 7,500+ responses

Quality is the Goal

QualDerm’s mission is “To establish, serve and extend a quality-driven dermatology network through partnering with physician leaders.” This mission informs everything we do.

Maintaining physicians’ clinical autonomy is one way QualDerm ensures that patient care comes before profit. Physician leadership is another. Not only do our affiliated physicians make the decisions in the exam rooms, but they also guide decisions in our board room, JOCs and the Quality Council. QualDerm-affiliated physicians weigh in on everything from who we partner with to what sutures we purchase.

While formal physician leadership roles are paramount to our organization’s success, physician engagement doesn’t end there. All affiliated physicians have a voice and direct access to the QualDerm leadership team. This close working relationship helped our affiliated practices successfully navigate the Covid pandemic.

At the beginning of the pandemic, physicians from every region and our leadership team held regular Zoom meetings to ensure we were attending to our patients’ and staffs’ needs while adhering to local and state restrictions and guidelines. These interactions continued through the re-open phase and even today, as safety guidelines evolve. For example, the CDC recently announced relaxed mask and social distancing guidelines in most situations for vaccinated people. Yet, the CDC recommended medical practices continue to observe the previous masking and distancing procedures. QualDerm leadership worked with our Chief Medical Officer to develop and execute internal and patient-facing communications plans to explain the differing safety guidelines and equip our staff with messaging to answer patient questions.

Solving Problems, Freeing Time

Few, if any, physicians graduated from medical school with a burning desire to trouble-shoot IT systems or delve into the minutia of billing. Yet, those tasks – and a multitude of others – come with medical practice ownership.

Help with handling these issues is often cited as a major reason physicians seek a partnership. The quality with which QualDerm manages practices is why many physicians chose to partner with us. QualDerm hires experienced professionals in each department – IT, HR, RCM, Ops, Legal, Finance – to take care of the day-to-day practice management and to solve the inevitable problems, such as a supply issues or even a global pandemic, which may happen or have already occurred.

QualDerm-affiliated physicians gain peace of mind of knowing that the practice management tasks are getting done, and that they are getting done right. This frees up time for physicians to pursue other professional interests such as research, serving as professors and mentors, and holding leadership positions within state, national and international medical organizations. In fact, many QualDerm-affiliated physicians are actively involved in such pursuits and have been recognized as leaders in the specialty for their commitment to advancing the practice of dermatology.

Learn more about how physician autonomy and leadership are at the core of QualDerm’s partnership model.

Contact us to find out about partnership opportunities or to discuss selling your practice.