EIM Hires Its First Full Time CEO!

EIM is at a pivotal stage of our growth cycle where we need someone full time to manage the day to day growth and opportunities that lie ahead. In other words, it's time to grow or go home. We are excited to announce that George Burkley has joined the EIM team as our first full time CEO! You can read his full bio here,

Download BurkelyGeorge.pdf

but suffice it to say that George is exceptionally well qualified and will be an integral component of EIM's future. George has a ton of experience in the health care industry at all levels and has extensive experience in growing small entrepreneurial companies like EIM. Welcome aboard the EIM Team!

If you think that our partnering with someone of George's caliber is a sign of optimism, you're correct. EIM is very optimistic about the future of physical therapy. We are the profession that spends time with our patients, puts our hands on them, explains things to them, and can utilize many non-surgical intereventions that are rooted in high quality evidence with few risks (ie, You have surgery, you have drugs, or you have us!). Unfortunately, much of the opportunity that lies ahead is attributable to our health care system being so broken. We believe that physical therapists are the heretofore unrecognized solution to many of our health care system's woes when it comes to managing musculoskeletal conditions. We are about 2-3% of the health care dollar and dwindling due to other things getting bigger. Despite what people think about our growing profession, we are actually shrinking relatively speaking compared to overall medical growth. 

In particular, we believe at EIM that to improve our caliber as a profession, we have to shrink our role and be identified as experts in neuromusculoskeletal medicine. Otherwise we are at risk of becoming (some would say we're already there) a nebulous profession without a clear picture of who we are to our constituency groups (consumers, payors, MD’s, etc.). Differentiating what we do is critical, and thus George's primary focus will be to focus EIM on opportunities that differentiate physical therapists as experts in providing neuromusculoskeletal care, particularly in a direct to employer setting that circumnavigates third party payors. EIM looks at employers as supply chain partners. Walmart knows Proctor and Gamble’s financials because they have a vested interest in keeping them in business. By directly contracting with employers using an EBP approach, we can eliminate the waste and abuse from 3rd party administrators who supply network credentialing, utilization review, repricing and claims transactions, etc. This is at least a 30% cost to an employer, yet employers get nothing in return except for a severely financially diminished provider who is constrained by hoops and ladders in supplying high quality care in a direct access environment. We believe the future of our profession lies in the hands of those willing to accept the risks of the care process...that is, you get paid for being efficient and providing high quality care rather than our current fee for service system that rewards you with more care but doesn’t do anything but drive up cost, contribute to inconsistency across the profession, and further diminish our role.

George, we are excited to have you on board and look forward to EIM doing everything it can to elevate the profesison of physical therapy and giving an overall boost to our health care system's ability to deliver high quality care at an affordable cost. All of this may sound grandiose on paper, but if you don't follow the blog regularly, check back in a few years for a status report. The health care landscape will look different.

We can't say thank you enough to our loyal EIM/MyPhysicalTherapySpace community and look forward to sharing the realization of the best days of our profession ahead with each of you.

John, Larry, Rob, and Tim...and now George!

Comments

[Selena Horner]

Congrats to the EIM team. I hope an impact can be made at a large, national level with the endeavors being pursued. Hopefully a more reasonable win-win situation for all involved - payor (less costs overall), patient (effective care) and provider (better reimbursement patterns) can be achieved. Both the business perspective and the quality of care perspective need to be addressed. I hope the team succeeds in its endeavors.

[Dan Pinto]

Welcome George

I think working directly with employers is certainly the way to go. The organization that I work for brought physical therapists in house (in addition to implementing pre-employment and post-injury testing) and it has seen millions of dollars in savings in worker's compensation costs over the 5 year history of this transition. My company recognized that it was being taken to the cleaners by POPTS and it decided to make a change. A savings like this will likely not be ignored by companies that are paying a serious premium for third party payers to manage their employees.