Physicians around the country are fighting to keep their private practices open. Emerald Coast Medical Group (ECMG) in Pensacola, Fla., is no exception. Every day is centered around serving every patient — with all the focus placed on comprehensive care and personal relationships. For ECMG, it’s their patients, more than anything else, are what makes it worth the effort to stay privately-owned.
Team effort, transformative care
ECMG first opened its doors more than 40 years ago, and stands as a staple of health care in the Pensacola community. The ECMG staff utilizes a team-based approach to deliver high-quality, full-service primary care, Practice Manager Marissa Vasquez said.
ECMG first opened its doors more than 40 years ago, and stands as a staple of health care in the Pensacola community. The ECMG staff utilizes a team-based approach to deliver high-quality, full-service primary care, Practice Manager Marissa Vasquez said.
Practice Manager Marissa Vasquez
“Each provider has their own way of seeing patients, but every patient can be seen by any provider here in the office. We pride ourselves on that.”
This flexibility allows patients to see who they need to see, when they need to see them. All of the physicians at ECMG have the same goal — support these patients in their journey to better health outcomes.
Jennifer Richardson, PA-C, has cared for patients at ECMG since 1999. She purchased the practice in 2021, and has served as its owner since, dedicated to continuing this mission. But, she’s not the only one who sees these patients.
“When you have a population of patients with multiple chronic conditions and you have multiple physicians honing in on one specific thing but not the whole person, things get missed,” she said.
When you add in factors like outside specialists and poor patient medical history recounts, the team has to work even harder to make sure patients aren’t receiving disjointed care or counterintuitive treatment.
“Patients get treated for something with another provider, and not recognizing it's contraindicated with a medication the patient is on, or a disease state that they have, the focus is on a singular issue instead of the patient as a whole,” Richardson said. “As the primary care providers, we're trying to treat the whole patient and recognize the whole instead of just the part.”
Aledade eases the workload
The ECMG staff leans into the tools offered by Aledade to address patient care questions.
“When you can look back at the patient's history and look at the charge history using the Daily Huddle in the worklist, you can find when they saw a specialist last and that really helps in the search for getting that patient note because a lot of times the patients say something like, ‘I saw somebody at cardiology a year ago. I don't remember who it was.’ They can be back in our office for a cardiac issue and it gives us a better history than the patient can often provide. We have that system to fall back on.”
The staff at Emerald Coast Medical Group focuses their attention on quality care, tracking patient data with Aledade's tools.
Richardson agreed. She said there’s no doubt in her mind about the benefits that Aledade provides — from patient care resources to quality tracking — and introducing those resources to your team is worth the effort.
“There's a learning curve to it, and it does take a bit to implement into your everyday workflow. But there is a significant benefit to the patient. Because we recognize that the patients are benefiting, it's worth doing.”
Private practice means more personalized care
ECMG’s partnership with Aledade doesn’t just help the staff provide better care, it helps ECMG stay independent by diversifying their revenue streams through value-based care, while reinforcing physician/patient relationships.
This is where Richardson lives her passion.
“Staying independent has always been a core value for Emerald Coast Medical Group. If you've been in a large hospital entity and they're constantly talking about, ‘Click this box and this, make sure this is done.’ That doesn't necessarily help the patient and it can be very frustrating to feel like I'm doing all this work, but where's the benefit to the patient?” she said.
“Having a private practice in and of itself is a minor miracle in the way of the big business right now,” she said. “That is where the benefit of Aledade comes in. Without our shared savings from last year, we wouldn't have been able to make the investments back into Emerald Coast Medical Group. I was able to update the computers on a quicker timeline, and we were able to get new medical exam tables in all 10 exam rooms.
Jennifer Richardson, PA-C, has been seeing patients at Emerald Coast Medical Group since 1999.
Using Aledade’s resources, technology and support have helped ECMG stay on track to receive their shared savings. According to Richardson, these funds are put back into the practice, which benefits ECMG’s patients.
“Not worrying about where I am going to find the money to do this has been really beneficial,” she said.
“These funds give us the financial flexibility to innovate and improve, while staying true to our values of affordability and high-quality care. Without shared savings, we might have been forced to make tougher decisions like delaying necessary updates, reducing staff, or even considering alignment with a larger system.
In many ways, these outcomes help preserve our independence and allow us to continue delivering the kind of care our patients have trusted for decades.”
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