The company is entirely profit-driven at the expense of good care. The only goal of management is to show a profit and attract investors.
They hire a great team of MDs to support mid-level providers and advise management, then make sweeping changes to how we provide care without consulting (and sometimes without informing) them.
As a provider you will be expected to see patients in 15 minutes regardless of their chief complaint and with few scheduled breaks. Your schedule will be supported by a remote team call center employees with no clinical experience who your assistant must instant message when you are behind in order to ask for a break in your schedule. They'll need to make a good case for you getting the break. If lawyering isn't their strength you may be out of luck. If the call center employees deem your situation desperate enough, your request will be granted.
Your assistant may be great but s/he won't start this way because they receive very little training and have no clinical experience. You'll have one member of this team of underpaid (mostly) college graduates to provide all of your onsite support. They are responsible not just for assisting you but phlebotomy, insurance, inventory, and customer service. Not surprisingly assisting the provider often takes a back seat. You do your own vitals and often have to clean up your own exam room after procedures. Turnover is high. If you're lucky enough to have a good assistant for a year, you'll spend the first 2-3 months struggling as they learn on the job and the last month or two struggling as their animosity toward the company calcifies and they lose interest in their job.
Work at a slow clinic? That sounds like less stress, right? You can spend more time with your patients and connect with people and remember why you got into medicine in the first place. NOPE. Management will hassle you about your visit duration, a metric they follow. You also may be asked to fill in at a busier clinic some days but won't be compensated as a float for your flexibility. Nonetheless, management will hassle you about building up your patient base, which is hard to do when your clinic has irregular hours. The system also doesn't support scheduling follow-ups beyond a few days. If you want to see a patient back after a month on his new asthma meds, you'll have to set up a reminder to email him. This is a theme, building up a practice is expected but you aren't given support in doing so.
The middle managers who directly supervise you come mostly from retail. When they are schmoozing you over on the latest change to how you deliver your care you just know you're getting a variation of the pep talk some Victoria's Secret Assistant manager got when the new Angels collection came out in 2010. They have little respect for healthcare providers. I once heard one of them refer to a group of providers as "you girls."
You might be asked to give feedback. Don't fall into this trap. For the most part this is a futile effort but those who are outspoken attract attention of middle management and not in a good way. If you choose to go down this road, extra attention will be paid to your metrics (timeliness, visit duration, revenue per visit, etc) and you will be singled out for having a bad attitude. You won't be given inside information on upcoming changes to the organization and compensation that might influence your clinic assignment requests. Upper management may be sincere in soliciting feedback but middle managers generally try to steer the conversation back to whatever they are there to sell you. Luckily, as noted above, they rarely have time to meet you since they manage so many providers and assistants.
