Why AMGA says now is the moment to move from talk to solutions

The ground has shifted under medical groups and health systems, and the American Medical Group Association (AMGA) and Practicing Excellence say that’s exactly why their partnership is happening now. It’s not enough to gather, swap notes and go back to business as usual. AMGA’s members want the association to help them find solutions they can trust and measure, and leaders say workforce pressures have made that need urgent. At the same time, clinicians are making sharper choices about where they work and why, weighing not just pay and workload but whether an organization helps them grow.

In an interview with Physicians Practice, AMGA President and CEO Jerry Penso, M.D., MBA, and Practicing Excellence founder Stephen Beeson, M.D., discuss why now is the proper time for their organizations to partner.

Physicians Practice: All right, what makes this the right moment for this partnership?

Jerry Penso, M.D., MBA, president and CEO of AMGA: AMGA members, we’re a trade association, typically look to us for education, convening and advocacy. Because we’re in the Washington, D.C., area, our members have told us they want more from AMGA. They want more than convening and discussing these types of problems. They want solutions, and they want AMGA to help them find the best solutions in the market.

We vet those solutions through a strategic growth committee we created, with specific criteria. Is this an important issue to our members? Are there real outcomes from this partner? Is this partner trusted by AMGA members and already working with many of them? We came up with 10 different criteria, and Practicing Excellence met all of them with flying colors.

So we decided it was right to partner with an organization like Practicing Excellence. We’ll only do so many of these strategic partnerships, and we’re going to do them where it really counts. Where it’s a member issue of high importance, and where we can make a difference. Our members are asking for that sort of guidance, and AMGA is playing the role of facilitator to make sure members with these issues can find the right solutions to their problems.

Stephen Beeson, M.D., founder of Practicing Excellence: And concurrently, we’ve found that if you look under the hood of what’s keeping clinical talent right now, it’s not only how the organization has led, how collaborative the teams are, and how purpose-focused they are, so the people providing care can be proud of who they work with and the kind of work they do.

But what we’re also seeing as an emerging priority is that people are selecting and staying at organizations where they have a chance to grow and ascend personally as a result of being part of the organization. It’s now as important as leadership behaviors, meaning, “I have a chance to grow and develop here.”

In my conversations with Jerry and AMGA, and in the work we’re doing in human development, that’s why this is an imperative now, because there’s an imperative for retaining clinical talent, engaging clinical talent and executing outcomes. The time for that is now. So here we are.