While Jamison, Pa.-based Physicians Endoscopy laid dormant for the first half of 2019, a June partnership kicked off the beginning of what could shape up to be a busy year for the gastroenterology-only ASC management company.
Physicians Endoscopy was established in July 1998 and has grown exponentially since then to feature over 60 GI ASC partners, performing more than 600,000 procedures annually.
Now, halfway through 2019, Physicians Endoscopy President David Young offered Becker's ASC Review several insights into the company and its future.
Note: Responses were edited for style and clarity.
Question: How would you describe the state of Physicians Endoscopy today?
David Young: We're in a good position. We have assimilated our larger acquisition of Frontier, which is behind us now that they've been integrated. We've been experiencing good organic growth in our business and we're experiencing good overall opportunity growth in the de novo and the M&A pipeline. We feel great about our overall GI ASC growth. On top of that, we're looking to expand our service model into the practice management business space.
Q: What's in store for the rest of 2019?
DY: For the rest of the year, we will be continually focused on organic growth for our existing centers. We'll compliment those efforts by launching our practice management platform and expect to achieve a good size and scale because of the strong partner we're launching with.
Q: Why are you launching a practice management platform?
DY: If you think about our business, we've historically built a 20-year reputation of being a high-service delivery platform for GI doctors on the ASC side, including anesthesia. What we've realized over the last couple of years is many of our GI doctors need solutions to help their practices be well-managed, utilize a similar suite of services, and come together on a larger platform. We'll be launching our practice management platform through a partnership with an established high reputation large practice where the MSO infrastructure already exists.
Q: Three years down the road, what does Physicians Endoscopy look like?
DY: Three years down the road we will be the single GI doctor services provider for any needs of a GI doctor. Whether it's pathology, infusion, anesthesia, ASC center development or management, practice management or recruiting, we will be the single vertical solution for providing services, support and investment to GIs. Projecting down the road, we are expecting to experience strong growth because of this single-focused solution.
Q: How does Physicians Endoscopy intend to compete with private equity investment?
DY: We have been regularly competing in the ASC market with large public and private multispecialty ASC management companies. We believe we have been successful as we provide deep services, we are flexible on investment levels, and continually look to improve alignment of interests with the doctors. In addition, we are only GI as we believe specialization leads to improvement of knowledge and services.
What I'm seeing in the practice management side is while there are new platforms coming through on the practice side, they do not have the depth of services for GI that we offer. We are naturally going to start bumping up against each other in the market, but there is enough opportunity out there for significant growth opportunities for everyone for a long time forward.
Q: What differentiates Physicians Endoscopy from the competition?
DY: We believe that professional management and support is the right way to grow and enhance the services for a GI ASC center. The world of healthcare is getting harder to deal with and more complex every day. If as doctors asks, "Why would you sign with Physicians Endoscopy?" The answer would be our model is unique in many ways – we are flexible on the level of investment needed in a center as we focus on partnership, our model is deep and experienced in the service offerings to center and now to practices, and we also only focus on GI.
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