Pros
Great patient demographic, you feel appreciated by the patient. Back and front staff are also very team-oriented.
Cons
Administrator heavy, physicians truly lack autonomy—your value is based on short term outcomes, not evidence-based long-term MIPS. It is simply a matter of how many patients can you see in an hour. RVU’s. You get zero time to call patients, check labs, document, coordinate care. You’re scheduled every single minute of the day except your lunch which you’re not paid for but you end up doing all admin work. Admin basically decide what you can and can’t do—how long you need for what type of patient etc. A rubber stamp CMO who is the nephew of the owner (?) just agrees with whatever will continue to generate more profits for his family. Nepotism is alive and well. While I was there, three of us physicians resigned within 4 months and all of us were truly dedicated to our patients. Altamed treated us like we were truly replaceable. They don’t value continuity of care—they see physicians as ‘providers’ which is actually what they call us. They don’t think about whether a patient may actually have built a certain relationship with their physician. They just see us as ‘that’s a provider, we’ll just get another provider’. They also cut physician salary by 10% during the pandemic but not administrators. We were frontline. That tells you two things; 1. Who is making the actual decisions. 2. How valued physicians are. Like most of these systems, they have about 5 X more admins than they need and not enough physicians in leadership. They top has no idea how to connect with let alone impact the frontline in an effective way. They can only drive us away and ultimately, patients follow. so do other physicians bc we are not loyal to institutions, we follow other physicians (not providers by the way).
