Introduction: Week 0 — Who I Am and Why This Project Matters to Me

Hi, my name is Gregory Shif and I’m a senior at BASIS Independent Brooklyn. For my Senior Project, I’ll be studying how different payment models affect the financial sustainability of pediatric clinics in New York City (NYC), specifically examining insurance-based, out-of-pocket, and membership care models.

My research will focus on answering this question: How do three different payment models (insurance-based, out-of-pocket, and membership care) affect the financial sustainability of pediatric doctors’ offices in NYC, and what are the main operating costs that these clinics have to manage to stay in business?

I’ve wanted to work in healthcare for a while now, but before diving deep into medicine, I wanted to understand how it actually works on the business side. That’s what brought me to a pediatric doctor’s office in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where I spent the past two summers working in the administrative side of the practice.

Those two summers changed how I think about healthcare. I watched doctors work incredibly hard to treat patients, while the practice struggled financially simply because insurance reimbursement rates didn’t cover the costs of running the practice. I also saw how much time frustrated staff spent on phone calls with insurance companies trying to get paid. Those moments are what pushed me toward this topic.

What struck me most was realizing that medicine and finance are completely inseparable, as even the best doctors cannot run a successful office without the proper business model. You can be the best pediatrician in Brooklyn, but if your payment model doesn’t work, you go out of business. Which results in hundreds without care. I watched how the doctors are forced to be business people whether they want to be or not. Physicians have to understand insurance contracts, they have to know their profit margins, they have to make decisions about which payment model keeps them afloat. It’s not something they talk about in medical school, but it’s the reality of running a practice. 

ABC Pediatrics is not a new site to me since I have worked there for a long time. I know how it operates firsthand, which is exactly why I wanted to bring my project back there. But I’m not just staying at one location. I’ll be working at different pediatric offices across NYC that have different payment models to get a real sense of how they work. I’ll be interviewing pediatricians at multiple practices and also talking to billing companies that handle finances for some of these offices. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be interviewing doctors and billing staff, reviewing literature, and working toward a final research paper with concrete findings. I hope you’ll follow along.

To view my senior project proposal, it is linked below. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_aGD4uz_7TfZa5CuN_faTZ3N6K5IvwnB/view?usp=sharing 

On-Site Location: 2634 Ocean Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. The practice does not have a website.

Mentor: Dr. Alexander Frenkel