Multidisciplinary practice focused on providing high-quality care in southern N.J.
SOMERS POINT — Doctors get into medicine to care for patients. The bureaucracy that surrounds it? Not so much.
That creates a conundrum.
Having doctors distanced from management decisions can mean not providing the best care for those patients. That is a prime reason Dr. Ulices A. Perez-Feliz stepped up to be the physician leader of Shore Physicians Group in 2021.
But that decision required some thought.
“For a while I was debating about getting more engaged because of my family and having young kids — I have a really busy young family — but the whole idea is that for a long time physicians in the United States have stepped away from administration and management because as physicians we don’t like administrative positions,” the primary care doctor said.
“We go into medicine to care for patients. All of those ancillary numbers and meetings? We hate that.
“We need to, as physician leaders, to be more engaged because the endpoint of providing health care to patients is the patient,” Perez-Feliz explained. “Nobody has a better understanding than the providers who provide the care and have one-to-one interactions with patients.
“I think part of the deterioration of the patient/doctor relationship in this country has come out of physicians stepping out of the arena of decision-making,” he said. “That’s why I decided I want to be part of the change and try to improve our patient experience and care as well.”
Perez-Feliz moved to the area to join Shore Physicians Group (SPG) because of his wife, Aixell Mercedes, MD, who was rotating at Shore Medical Center in pediatrics.
Dr. Mercedes fell in love with the area and the organization. When their family was in Kansas, they always thought about coming back to the East Coast and the Somers Point area was at the top of their list.
What attracted them to SPG is that it is a physician-led organization in which the physicians have more say in the day-to-day management of the group.
“That’s why we said this is the place to be because we were in something similar in Kansas,” Perez-Feliz said.
“We are the ones providing the care, so we like to be listened to and taken into consideration when decisions are made. That was pretty much the reason we decided to stay here and so far it has been 10 years.”
Shore Physicians Group and Shore Medical Center
Perez-Feliz said Shore Physicians Group has a holistic approach and has “been in a growing mode” since its inception in 2012.
It is under the same umbrella as Shore Medical Center and being linked with electronic medical records (EMR) provides “a seamless connection and exchange of information between and inside Shore Physicians Group and Shore Medical Center.
“At SPG we communicate better and that makes it more efficient, makes the patient experience more pleasant, and will improve outcomes,” he said. “We are always trying to grow the specialists that are more in need in our community.
“Among that we try to improve the services at Shore Medical Center to keep and provide more services here. That is really important because that was one of the ideas when Shore Physicians Group was created, especially with the support from Ocean City and Somers Point communities.
“It was to keep, as much as we can, high-quality services here at Shore Medical Center and Shore Physicians Group as providers.”
Perez-Feliz said every time SGP has its annual retreat, it seems “to be growing, growing, growing. We grow with the needs. We want to provide a holistic experience at SPG for the patients.”
When the group started, it was mainly internal and family medicine and there was one general surgeon.
No longer.
As SGP grew its primary care footprint, it also grew with the specialities it provides.
SPG now includes endocrinology, with two endocrinologists and one nurse practitioner; a robust surgical department with general surgery, vascular surgery, neurosurgery and neurology; orthopedic sports medicine with two orthopedists; pathology, cosmetic and reconstructive surgery; rheumatology, urology and urgent care, according to Perez-Feliz.
Over the past 10 years, it brought in the hospitalist team from Shore Medical Center as part of the SPG team.
Its physical footprint has grown as well.
At SPG’s inception, the main location was Somers Point and there was a second in Northfield.
Since then, SPG has opened an office in Marmora, followed by offices in Ocean City and Margate. The most recent location is in Mays Landing, where it has a “state-of-the-art new building,” Perez-Feliz said.
“In cooperation with Shore Medical Center, we have grown more, bringing in a robot to do robotic surgery,” he added. “We’re working on bringing in better technology and top-of-the-line services to Shore to try to provide more safe services here with better outcomes.
“Also we started working with the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM) in which our third-year students rotate in through the hospital, Shore Physicians Group and Shore Quality Partners. That has also increased the engagement of providers into teaching,” he said.
“If you are in a teaching environment, that just drives quality and better care and more evidence-based and outcome-based health care,” Perez-Feliz explained. “I’m really excited about all of those projects that we are engaged in already and looking forward to keep going with this.”
The goal for SGP is to keep “focusing our services in Atlantic County and Cape May County and growing our teaching programs because all of that is beneficial. It keeps strengthening our relationship and alliance with the University of Pennsylvania. We are part of the Penn Network group so our surgeons are also part of the Penn Network.”
The hospitalist program
A big part of that growth on the SPG side has been the hospitalist program.
“I was full time as a hospitalist for a while during the past 10 years, so I know a little bit of both. I feel that the hospitalist is an extension of me in the hospital,” Perez-Feliz said. “We have direct communication with the physicians that are taking care of our patients in the hospital.
“The hospitalist program is not just the doctors. We have our patient navigator inside the hospital that lets us know as soon as our patients get admitted into the hospital. We have geographic rounding so we know on which floor our patients will be and we can communicate directly with the physicians.”
The connection with patients continues at the moment they are discharged.
“Our patient navigators along with our hospitalist will formulate additional planning, what we call our transition-of-care visit with our outpatient providers,” he said. “This is a really positive and important part for the patient’s continuation of care in which we can seamlessly transition from inpatient to outpatient and outpatient to in-patient.”
That’s another area with the records link comes into play.
“We have access to our inpatient medical records and hospitalists have access to our out-patient medical records so they can see what we are doing with our patients outside, and that can sometime decrease extra, unnecessary workups,” he said.
The hospitalist, he added, “is a really important part of our team.”
Doctors also need work-life balance
He said when SPG started 10 to 12 years ago there were few independent providers around compared with the present.
“That is the way things are moving. That is the reality of health care in the United States,” he said.
Understanding that, Perez-Feliz pitches other doctors to join SPG by focusing on two key points.
“Number one is culture. Our culture is that we put our patients first and we do everything to make our patient experience better,” he said.
That gets back to his original point — they become doctors because they want to care for patients and having a physician-led group enhances that care.
“Number two,” he said, “is the work-life balance and support system.
“We try to provide our providers in general with more of a team. We work as a team. We not only have our providers, we have patient service representatives that are the face of our institution. We have medical assistants with health care coordinators, all to help our physicians provide better care to our patients,” he added.
“All those things are ways to try to prevent burnout and still provide good care. That is what I pitch to everybody that I want to join our group,” he said. “It is that we try to improve the patient experience but also the physician experience.
“The practice of medicine has become way more stressful and tiring and grinding before the pandemic, after the pandemic and through the pandemic even worse. So we are trying to bring more support as a team around the physician to provide better outcome for both sides — patients and physicians.”
Ulices A. Perez-Feliz, MD, has been with Shore Physicians Group since May 2013. He attended and graduated with his medical degree from Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo. Dr. Perez has more than 23 years of diverse experience including vast experience in hospital medicine, according to his profile. To learn more about SPG, go online to shorephysiciansgroup.com
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff