Dr. Kip Schumacher, founder of the Schumacher Group (now SCP Health), one of the largest healthcare management companies in the U. S., joined Discover Lafayette to discuss his medical career journey and creation of the William C. Schumacher Family Foundation which funds charitable initiatives focused on improving quality of life, education, crisis response, and healthcare measures. Erica Ray, CEO of the foundation, also joined us.
Kip is a Lafayette native, and attended Hamilton Elementary School and Lafayette High. He graduated from USL (now UL-Lafayette) and LSU Medical School.
A successful entrepreneur at an early age, Kip made costume jewelry from brass, silver, and gold wire to fund his higher education. His creations caught the eye of Barbara Abdalla, and the iconic Lafayette retailer, Abdalla's, was the first to buy from him.
While he started out in pediatrics, Kip would moonlight in the ER and he fell in love with emergency room medicine. It was an environment where he got to know people of all ages from all walks of life and he realized how challenging access to medicine could be for so many people. He worked for 17 years as an ER doc at Opelousas Medical Center and it was there that Kip realized there had to be a more efficient way to treat patients while helping the hospital make the financial side work.
In 1980 when Kip started working at Opelousas General, the hospital contracted separately with each doctor. Kip approached the management team with a proposal to let him manage hirings, payroll, scheduling, and medical malpractice claims; he witnessed how effectively the doctors worked when they operated as a team rather than as separate independent contractors answering to the hospital.
His chance to expand his management acumen came about when a doctor friend at Iberia General approached him to take over their administrative operations when he retired. Kip found the work rewarding and it followed his calling to provide the type of medical service they did at Opelousas General. His mission was to provide quality care for the patients and he came to understand that success was dependent upon all of the healthcare providers working as a team, and respecting one another. This team concept in medicine was relatively new at the time.
Kip had learned that it wasn't his prescribed treatment that made a difference in patient outcomes, "It's everything around that patient that makes a difference." He endeavored to ensure that each team member from the ward clerk, the nurses, and the doctors, were respected. "That was the strategy that led me down the path of starting Schumacher Group. It's a simple philosophy that I've found has held a lot of people back, not just in medicine, but in business in general and in life. They don't stop and look at the people around them and realize that their lives are so dependent upon people that they don't show the respect that they could. Look at everyone around you and see how they fit into the grand scheme of what it is you're trying to accomplish."
He established the Schumacher Group in 1994 with the goal of helping hospitals streamline their Emergency Room operations with staffing, scheduling, billing, insurance, and quality management. Kip grew the Schumacher Group from managing the ER services at 10 facilities in one year to 50 facilities in 5 years.
After experiencing exponential growth over the years, Schumacher merged with other companies to widen its array of services. Today, SCP Health is one of the largest healthcare partners in the country serving over 8 million patients in 30 states. Kip's dream of bringing his caring touch to help our most vulnerable get the most efficient access to healthcare has truly become a reality.