ENT Partners’ Jim Feinstein on Private Equity’s Impact on Healthcare

Joining us today on The Scope is Jim Feinstein. Jim is the CEO of ENT Partners, a private equity backed ENT platform that is growing rapidly throughout the Midwest and East Coast. Prior to ENT Partners, Jim had a successful tenure as the President of United Skin Specialists after many years as an executive in several Ophthalmology companies.

With over 20 years as a healthcare executive bringing strategic oversight and valued growth initiatives to his organizations, Jim is well-known in the industry as a reputable leader who delivers for his investors and teams. You might have heard him on a few of Scott Becker’s recent podcasts sharing his insights on the future of the industry and how his work aligns with it.

On today’s episode, we’re going to chat about healthcare platforms and their place in the future of the industry and value-based care. We will also touch upon private equity and its impact on the healthcare world today and how it differs from health system and insurance carrier consolidation. Last, we will discuss how all of this will change the patient’s access to care, convenience, costs, and experience.  

Highlights include:

1. How he built physician organizations and healthcare services platforms in different specialties and the similarities and differences of growing and operating successful healthcare enterprises  
2. What drew Jim to joining ENT Partners as their CEO.
3. How private equity continues to grow in healthcare and the reasons why.
4. How physicians are dealing with all of this change.
5. Given all the movement with employed versus independent physicians, how do physicians determine if joining a health system, a financially backed platform such as Jim’s, or being purely independent makes the most sense for them?
6. What other challenges lie ahead for physicians, patients, and systems?
7. A discussion on the term “value-based care” and how it is used over and over again in today’s industry, yet no one has clearly defined what it is and means in terms of execution. Jim discusses the need for alignment which has become the missing piece.  
8. The exciting disruptive companies on the scene, and the challenge Jim sees of their potential to be acquired and sidelined before they can drive the shift they need to see.
9. How ENT Partners fits into that value-based care definition and how he is leading ENT into this volatility knowing the headwinds in front of him.
10. Jim then talks about office-based procedure setting and how it saves the patient money, the insurance company money and maintains or improves the reimbursement levels for the providers and how we’ll continue to see more movement toward that. As Jim sees it, from a quality-of-care perspective, there’s no reason for these procedures to be performed in the hospital except that the health insurance companies are reimbursing them at 3 – 10x the facilities fees.
11. In closing, Jim and Scott discuss what needs to happen to improve the healthcare system and who needs to lead the charge.

I invite you to follow Jim Feinstein and ENT Partners to hear more of their insights on this industry.

For more episodes of The Scope, follow along on Twitter at @TheScope_MA and on LinkedIn. If there are any guests you’d like to hear our podcast, send your ideas my way – you can message me here.