From cradle to grave, health care is a full-service industry that is all about planning and forecasting. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) changes many of the rules to which medical professionals, insurance companies and health-care service providers have grown accustomed.
Commonly known as Obamacare, the law has changed employee-benefit cost structures, business and tax reporting rules, and individual insurance choices. The ACA is drastically changing nonprofit community health and human services sectors, along with every business connected to them — from nursing accreditation programs to the pharmaceutical industry.
The short-form version of the law includes hundreds of pages of regulations that must be implemented in order for health-care providers to be in compliance. The ACA, passed by Congress in 2010, provides hundreds of millions of dollars in annual grants for a range of required services. Up to $190 million annually “shall be” provided for improving surveillance and response to infectious disease, for example, while “not less than $60 million” is to be provided annually to government-private sector partnerships, including contractors hired to train the health-care workforce.
Click here for the full text of The Affordable Care Act.
Although the law is short on specifics of how the funding is to be dispersed among the states, the ACA lays out stringent guidelines for health-care businesses to follow. Those credentialed companies and organizations that offer successful track records working with government agencies have an edge over newer competitors.
The HispanicBusiness 2013 Top 10 Health Care Organizations™ encompass established enterprises founded by Hispanics. Some, like Clinica Sierra Vista, have been offering local health services for decades. Others, like Molina Healthcare Inc., have earned respect from the broader enterprise community as established organizations with national networks.
Seven of the organizations on the Top 10 Health Care Organizations list below offer nonprofit community services. They are AltaMed, Clinica Sierra Vista, Communilife, Urban Health Plan Inc., La Clinica, Acacia Network and San Ysidro Health Center.
Three of the organizations offer for-profit services that are indirectly involved in providing medical care. Molina of Long Beach, Calif., stands out as the most well-established in terms of growth. The for-profit insurance provider reports more than $4.8 billion in revenues for 2011, according to HispanTelligence.
Another private enterprise among the group — Bankers Healthcare Group — is a Florida-based financial institution with regional offices in New York and Denver that offers loans to health-care professionals and small businesses specializing in medical and dental services.
Finally, InGenesis of San Antonio is a staffing firm for physicians, nurses, dentists and health-care support staff.
Top 10 Health Care Organizations
HispanTelligence, the research arm of HispanicBusiness Inc., assessed the data upon which the selections (see table) were made. HispanicBusiness based the 2013 rankings on each organization’s status as a premiere community health-care-related business and its total revenues and expenditures.
There is a wide range in dollar totals for the firms listed, beginning with the top three: Molina Healthcare Inc. (No. 1: $4.8 billion), AltaMed (No. 2: $188.5 million), and Bankers Healthcare Group (No. 3: $155.3 million).
| Organization/Company | Location | CEO | 2011 Expenditures/ Revenue |
Unique Visitors to Website December 2012* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Molina Healthcare Inc. www.molinahealthcare.com |
Long Beach, CA | Joseph M. Molina | $4,769,900,000 (revenue) |
48,183 |
| AltaMed Health Services Corp. www.altamed.org |
Los Angeles, CA | Castulo de la Rocha | $188,512,873 | 8,208 |
| Bankers Healthcare Group Inc. www.bhg-inc.com/ |
Syracuse, NY | Albert Crawford | $155,289,447 (revenue) | 1,228 |
| Acacia Network www.acacianetwork.org |
Bronx, NY | Raul Russi | $96,000,000 | 2,320 |
| La Clinica de La Raza www.laclinica.org |
Oakland, CA | Jane Garcia | $71,408,169 | 3,813 |
| Clinica Sierra Vista www.clinicasierravista.org |
Bakersfield, CA | Stephen Schilling | $69,000,000 | 3,327 |
| San Ysidro Health Center www.syhc.org |
San Diego, CA | Ed Martinez | $63,655,624 | 5,025 |
| InGenesis Inc. www.ingenesis.org/Home.aspx |
San Antonio, TX | Veronica Edwards | $57,300,255 (revenue) | 2,318 |
| Urban Health Plan Inc. www.urbanhealthplan.org |
Bronx, NY | Paloma Izquierdo-Hernandez | $50,329,915 | 141 |
| Comunilife Inc. www.comunilife.org |
New York, NY | Rosa Gil | $26,684,188 | 1,805 |
* Data from Compete.com
UPDATE: Urban Health Plan has provided additional data showing that it had 2,878 unique visitors in December 2012 and 31,940 unique visitors for the year ending in December 2012, according to Google Analytics.
Case Studies and Trends
Ed Martinez, president and CEO of San Ysidro Health Center in California.
Among health-care providers, San Ysidro Health Center stands out for its longevity. The organization began life in 1968 as a community clinic that provided voluntary services in partnership with the University of California, San Diego. It has evolved into a full-scale primary care service provider headed by CEO Ed Martinez.
Urban Health Plan of New York provides a network of community health centers located in the South Bronx and Queens. It is led by CEO Paloma Izquierdo-Hernandez, who has helped the organization transition into one of the top 20 community health centers in the country.
AltaMed has four decades of experience as a medical-care provider with more than 40 long-term senior-care facilities. Today, the organization has annual operating expenditures of more than $188 million. President and CEO Castulo de la Rocha described AltaMed as a nonprofit organization with operations in Los Angeles and Orange counties, “where the ratio of doctors to patients is as high as one to 10,000.”
To help staff clinics, hospitals and other health-care providers, the ACA provides incentives to firms that specialize in recruiting top physicians, nurses and other medical personnel.
Veronica Edwards, president and CEO of InGenesis, acknowledged she has some concerns about the expansive law. She said new regulations, pending legislation and market trends, career projections and labor shortages, insurance industry and IRS changes, and medical college accreditation programs play a big part in assessing the needs of the health-care industry.
Veronica Edwards, president and CEO of InGenesis in Texas.
Ms. Edwards founded the San Antonio-based company in 1998 as a recruitment firm for the telecommunications industry. She explained that her company started by providing telecommunications specialists for clients when she realized the high-tech business was becoming a mature industry.
“The economy was starting to show signs that it couldn’t sustain or support those kinds of jobs,” she recalled. “I reached out to other industries, and all the forecasts were telling us to go into medical.”
Her first client was the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, which relied on InGenesis to recruit “high-end doctors.”
By 2001, InGenesis was 100 percent focused on recruiting professionals for the medical industry, she said. Today, the company has 1,600 contracts in more than 40 states. About half of those contracts are for recruiting physicians, with the remainder comprising highly accredited nurses, medical technicians and dental professionals. The majority of InGenesis contracts are with federal, state and local government-supported medical facilities, including the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration and Health and Human Services.
Better Prepared for Health Care
AltaMed’s Zoila Escobar, vice president of Strategic Development and Community Support, stated that the ACA has allowed the creation of a wide range of income-based health-care plans at the state and local levels that can now be managed by a single-service provider.
Zolia Escobar, vice president of stategic development and community support for AltaMed in Los Angeles.
“Many more of our patients will have health insurance, meaning that in many instances care that we paid for from grants or private donations will now be covered through insurance plans,” Ms. Escobar stated in an email outlining AltaMed’s response to the ACA. “Above any other demographic group, Latinos will benefit from the Affordable Care Act. For middle-class individuals, the subsidized exchange will be a big benefit.”
Noting that the ACA doesn’t fix all of the challenges inherent in our system, Ms. Escobar stated that AltaMed has “been gearing up for health-care reform for several years by making investments that we believe will best prepare us to care for patients in the future. It also means that we’ll be able to provide preventative care and help manage conditions before they get out of hand, enabling us to reduce the overall burden on the system.”
The law has prompted AltaMed to upgrade its infrastructure and hire additional doctors to ensure that it can meet the capacity to care for thousands of new patients with access to health care. These upgrades seem to fit well with the staffing services provided by firms like InGenesis.
Although InGenesis CEO Edwards acknowledged that the ACA is a complex and comprehensive document, she indicated it’s all about business — and business is all about planning.
Although the entrepreneur said it’s difficult to forecast where the health-care industry is heading, InGenesis is laser-focused on the increased demand for qualified medical professionals.
“We’ve looked at the U.S. as a whole,” Ms. Edwards said. “Whether it’s the Hispanic population, or the aging population, or mental-health services as a result of returning war veterans, we look at the whole health picture of the United States.”
For-profit companies like InGenesis and nonprofit organizations like AltaMed that can successfully make the transition toward a radically changed national health-care system stand to benefit from the ACA. Businesses and institutions that cannot adapt to the coming changes face an ongoing battle competing for government-funded contracts and community services.
Although it doesn’t change everything, the law does require Americans to be better-prepared for health care. The 10 organizations recognized by HispanicBusiness are helping them do just that.
Research by HispanTelligence.
Source: HispanicBusiness.com (c) 2013. All rights reserved.
