What High-Performing Groups Know That the Rest of Us Are Still Figuring Out

I recently attended Ancore Health’s High Performing Medical Group Summit as part of our co-sponsorship, and this wasn’t your typical conference where everyone nodded along to the same slides or only shared the successes. The room was full of people wrestling with hard problems, authentically sharing pitfalls, pivots, and triumphs too. A few conversations stuck with me enough that I want to share them here.

One theme came up consistently as each case study was presented: “don’t let a good crisis go to waste.”

Cynical on its face, but the pressure medical groups are under right now is also the best leverage point to drive change. Crisis has a way of making people willing to do things they’d otherwise put off for another year, and creates the urgency to decide swiftly. With the many tools now available that we can ‘add’ to the list, one powerful reframing was what could we instead ‘take away’ or simplify to create focus.

The power of focus, alignment on incentives, and transparency were evident across each and every high performing medical group there. Further, several were the ‘calm under pressure’ leaders who navigated their organization through tremendous change, sometimes in almost ‘impossible’ timelines (i.e. cash on hand, cyberattacks, Covid, etc.).

That can be the power for a ‘good crisis’.

Another comment came from a physician in the room, and it’s the one I keep coming back to.

“We are one click away from burnout.”

She wasn’t talking about any one workflow in particular, she was making a bigger point about how we design systems in the first place.

A lot of practices still lean on “the human in the loop,” (singular), as their safety net. Her argument was that you need two humans in the loop, especially if one of those humans is a provider on the verge of burnout, not one. That’s not inefficiency, that’s the difference between a system that fails safely and one that doesn’t.

Different groups, same four problems

The room was a broad mix of PE owned groups, independents, AMC affiliated practices, and hospital owned systems. You’d think that mix would mean different priorities across the board.

Instead almost everyone was working through the same four things.

• The first was change management, and most of that centered on physician compensation alignment. How do you get comp models actually pointed in the same direction as the behavior you’re trying to drive?
• The second was scaling AI. Ambient scribes have quietly become table stakes in the last year. Nearly every group in the room had them now.The next was RCM alignment with AI/automation to drive sustainability. A handful of groups had also started to pilot voice AI for patient scheduling, while others hadn’t even started to think about it.
• The third was staying financially viable. Primary care alone is a tough business right now, and it is important to explore how to diversify revenue through VBC initiatives or other lines of business.
• The fourth was data as a strategic asset, and this is the one I think is most underrated. One group has really harnessed its own data for clinical AI and real world evidence work. It’s an early signal of something bigger coming: health care providers shifting from being clients of software vendors to becoming suppliers in the data ecosystem, given how much tracking data scribes and other AI are now generating.

One thing worth being honest about. When people pushed on whether AI is actually improving margin, nobody had a clean answer. The belief is that it should, eventually.

Right now, the more accurate statement is that AI is driving new revenue in pockets, not necessarily that it’s making the cost side of the business cheaper. That gap is worth watching closely instead of assuming it’ll close on its own.

People and process, then tech

If I had to name one thesis that tied the whole event together, it’s this: the groups actually performing at a high level got there through strong leadership, real alignment on people and change management, and disciplined process change backed by data. And they do this consistently over time.

That’s what truly moves the needle. Technology has a role to play, but it plays that role after the people-first foundation and process operations are in place.

Do you wait for the EHR, or do you go get started?

Last thing worth mentioning. Not every point solution integrates cleanly with the EHR, and the instinct might be to just wait until it does before buying anything.

Most people in the room landed somewhere different: don’t wait.

Go get the best solution for the specific area you need, solutions are evolving so quickly, pressure testing with the specialized knowledge solutions helps you and your team learn quickly if it’s moving the needle, integration gaps and all.

But that answer comes with a question you have to ask first, and it’s the one people skip too often. Is this actually the thing you need most? Not every problem calls for the shiny new tool. Before you buy anything, it’s worth checking whether it will genuinely move the needle on financials, operations, or provider/patient satisfaction, or whether it’s just the most exciting option in the room right now.

Wrapping up

I left this event with more to think about than usual; the role of AI in creating a patient’s agency of their own health and how medical groups navigate it today and will in the future (it’s a topic for another whole conference!).

But if there’s one thread running through everything above, it’s this: every one of those four problems traces back to whether the fundamentals were already solid.

The groups with real leadership alignment and disciplined process change were the ones actually putting AI and data strategy to work. The groups still navigating comp misalignment or unclear ownership over change were the ones that are stuck. Technology doesn’t fix a shaky foundation, it just makes it more visible.