This position is going to be a 100% outpatient with no nights, no weekends and no ED call. The need is for a general GI (potentially have the ability to do ERCP). The schedule is 4-days per week, with 2 days in the clinic and 2 days doing procedures. When asked to describe the practice, Ken said:
“49% of patients are colonoscopy. Only 23% are EGDs and 28% are doubles. Those are the only things we're doing. We're not doing ERCPs or any advanced cases. Out of these colonoscopies, 75% of our patients have a polyp which is huge. It's three times the national average, right? We find it. We're finding lots of cancers. Some of those we tag, we do a lot of polypectomies. That's pretty much all we're doing right now. Okay? We're not doing a lot of soft control dilation yet, though we're gonna be doing capsule endoscopy soon. This is just the definition of a General GI practice.”
When there is a full team of 3 FTEs the plan will be for only 2 providers working 3 days of each week. On those days one provider will be in the clinic and the other will be doing procedures every day. Two days a week there will be 2 providers in the clinic and 1 provider in the procedure room to maximize efficiency.
Volumes
The goal is for providers to see 15 patients a day in the clinic and to do 12 procedures each day in the Endoscopy suite. When I was there Dr. Ma’n Abdullah had14 procedures schedules and said he has 16 on Thursday with a good percentage being doubles.
When asked about the potential volume in the future Ken said:
“I mean, there's so many patients that need it, and we can double our GI volume right now if we marketed it. There's a hospital 25 miles away in Olympia, Capital Medical Center, they have now 25 primary care providers, and they want to start sending their all of their patients for screening colonoscopies here, because in Olympia, they can't get someone in for eight months, and those GI practices aren't looking at growing. And we're like, well, we're not ready yet, but when we get it ready and we have the capacity, sure. I have another hospital in Shelton, it's a critical access hospital, and the CMO called me two weeks ago and said the same thing, hey, you guys have a GI program now, can we start sending our patients there? There is even on thats a 30 minute drive, right, Centralia. They want us to take their GI cases as well. They don't have any GI down there so we could grow it as big as we want.”