Aug 19, 2025
By Elizabeth Hayes – Staff Reporter, Portland Business Journal
In an era of consolidation and financial challenges in health care, a group of Portland clinics have banded more closely together not just to find strength in numbers, but in hopes of retaining their individual autonomy.
“Between staffing shortages and inflation, it’s hard to stay independent,” said Charlotte Flood, CEO of NW Primary Care and the point person for the Portland Coordinated Care Association, or PCCA. “That’s why we decided we can do this better together.”
Earlier this year, the four clinics in PCCA took a longstanding collaboration to a new level and officially became a Clinically Integrated Network. They share resources, staff, protocols and data, hold each other accountable to a set of quality metrics and enjoy greater negotiating power in insurance contracting and purchasing for supplies, vaccines and equipment.
The strategy is one way that independent practices have responded to market pressures that have transformed the medical profession and made it increasingly difficult for physician-owned clinics to remain that way, said Dr. Paul Berggreen, a gastroenterologist in Phoenix and board chair and president of the American Independent Medical Practice Association.
Whereas three quarters of medical clinics were physician-owned in the 1980s, only one in four are today, he noted.
“The change in the landscape of has been nothing short of remarkable,” Berggreen said.
Hospitals, which have been scooping up practices for years, have huge advantages over their independent brethren. Medicare pays more for the exact same procedure performed in a hospital, even though the quality is no better, Berggreen said.
“Hospital systems will purchase a struggling independent medical practice that’s delivering great care to patients but having a hard time making a go of it and convert the office to a hospital outpatient department and get a bump in rates,” he said.
Continue reading here: Portland primary care providers band together to stay independent - Portland Business Journal