Founder Note: Why I Started ZMD Group
ZMD Group exists because the consolidation of American specialty medicine over the last fifteen years has been led almost entirely by capital, not by physicians — and the result has been a generation of multi-specialty platforms that are efficient on a spreadsheet and hollow at the bedside. The platform is an attempt to invert that pattern by combining clinical authority with institutional capital discipline.
I have spent the last twenty years inside two seats simultaneously: an operating-room seat, where the only thing that matters is the standard of care, and a practice-owner seat, where the only thing that matters is whether the operation can be sustained. From those two seats, the same observation kept resurfacing. The platforms acquiring practices around me were optimized to a financial model I could read on a single page, but the clinical model behind that financial model was almost always either undefined or borrowed.
ZMD Group is the platform I would have wanted to join if it had existed when I was earlier in my career. It is led by a physician. It treats clinical authority as the first principle, not the marketing line. It is operationally disciplined in the way an institutional bank is disciplined, because my Co-Founder, Marques Kernan, came from inside that world and brought the playbook with him. And it is built around an integrated research arm because the medicine I want to practice for the next twenty years is the medicine generated inside that kind of platform — not licensed in from someone else's.
Written for ZMD Group Editorial. Inquiries: [email protected].