Editorial
Front Page - Friday, July 31, 2009
Taylor chosen to chair health care conference for 3rd time
Samara Litvack
By Samara Litvack
Accountant William H. Taylor II graduated from Southern Missionary College (now Southern Adventist University) in 1975. For several years, he operated a local CPA practice before selling the company in 1982 and moving into the health care field.
“I’ve been a hospital chief financial officer for a number of years,” he says. “I was vice president for finance and administration at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., for five years. I worked for David Satcher, who later became surgeon general of the United States, which was a very interesting job.”
At Meharry Medical College, Taylor concentrated on human resources and oversaw the budget. He participated in the strategic process and, in his time there, helped develop and negotiate a merger between Nashville General Hospital, owned by the City of Nashville, and Meharry-Hubbard Hospital, owned by Meharry.
“We called it a merger but basically … we got out of the hospital business and into the real estate business,” he says. “The city leased our building and took over the combined patient base and combined employee base.”
It was a fairly long process, but Taylor feels honored to have worked alongside then-Mayor Phil Bredesen to save the city some money and open another income stream for Meharry. The merger came with great benefits to Meharry, one of four historically black academic medical centers in the country, as its capacity for education increased with the additional income.
When Satcher left Meharry in the early ‘90s, Taylor began working exclusively in physician practices. He worked for Phycorp, a physician practice management company, for three years and moved on to a corp-managed hospital in Savannah, Ga., for three years before deciding to return home to Chattanooga in 2000.
He began consulting in his hometown immediately, and soon picked up work with local company UT Physicians. In 2004, the company asked him to act as its part-time executive director. He filled the position for about a year, and then decided to merge the assets of UT Physicians with his consulting work to develop his current company, Physician Practice Resources.
“Physician Practice Resources has all the services available where a doctor can walk in, see patients and leave, and we take care of everything,” he says. “Or, we can do as little as help them with a specific problem and have a resulting arrangement.”
The company also handles billing, which includes maintaining credential information with all the insurance companies and hospitals, so some clients request that service alone. Others come to Physician Practice Resources for only management services.
“Our expertise is in the one, two- and three-doctor practice range because we can provide management capabilities that they can’t afford on their own,” he says.
“One of the options that we give our physician services, if we’re providing management to them, is put their employees on our payroll so they become our employees and they have access to lower cost benefits that way. We have 55 employees total and we can buy health insurance and other insurance products a lot less expensively than a physician would with only two employees. So we’re a good fit for smaller practices.”
The other thing with which Taylor and his staff have much experience is helping physicians transition from group practice to private. Whether tired of high overhead or bureaucracy or simply wishing to fulfill a lifelong dream, Physician Practice Resource has the ability to help such aspiring doctors, as the company can decrease cost on billing and cut overhead dramatically.
“The conventional wisdom is you get economies in scale by coming together,” he says.
Taylor has much to offer his clients as a CPA with 25 years’ experience in health care. His chief financial officer, Velma Hixson, is also a CPA with more than 25 years’ experience in the same industry. Among the 15 employees in the company’s central office, there is approximately 250 years’ experience in health care and physician work. No wonder Physician Practice Resources has such a loyal client base.
Taylor estimates there are 25 to 30 clients with which his company consults on a monthly basis. There are probably 60 to 80, he says, they’ve done consulting work for in the last 10 years.
Even with all this on his plate, Taylor finds time to stay active with the Tennessee Society of CPAs. In fact, this year he is chairing the organization’s Health Care Conference for the third time.
“The Health Care Conference is probably the largest conference the Tennessee Society
of CPAs puts on, and they do some very fine conferences,” he says.
“Certified public accountants, like lawyers and doctors and everyone else, have to have continuing education. So the Health Care Conference is attended by about 300 to 350 CPAs from all across the state, and some other states.”
Taylor says about half of the attendees work in the health care industry; the other half is in independent practice, with a significant health care client base.
“We try to structure it so there’s something there for everybody,” he says. “We have several breakout sessions where there will be a hospital topic, a physician’s topic and a nursing home topic and people can pick the sessions they want to attend.”
The conference always offers fine general sessions, as well. This
year, for example, the group has invited Sen. Bob Corker to speak on the future of federal health care legislation.
Other sessions will include a health care law update, put on by different large law firms in the Southeast, and a technology update. This year, Taylor says the tech talk will be based on electronic health records, as the government is encouraging their use by physician practices.
“We also have an economic update at the end of the conference from one of the emeritus faculty from UT Knoxville, and that’s always been a very well-received discussion,” says Taylor.
The conference will be held on Monday, Nov. 30, and Tuesday, Dec. 1, at the Marriott Cool Springs in Franklin, Tenn. For more information, visit http://www.tncpa.org/conferences/healthcare.aspx.
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