Family physician Isaac J. Myers II, MD, has worn many hats in his lifetime. He’s written several novels and designs clothing in his spare time. Ask him about his biggest passion, however, and he’ll tell you about his journey as a physician administrator to improve health outcomes and access to care.
Building a successful multispecialty physician group takes some elbow grease. Dr. Myers faced an exciting but challenging road ahead when Baptist Health hired him in 2014 to help consolidate physicians across five entities into one medical group supporting seven hospital markets.
Starting with more than 700 physicians and nonphysician providers in 2015, Baptist Health Medical Group has since doubled in size to over 1,800 in 2025 as the group marks its 10-year anniversary.
For Dr. Myers, the group’s chief health integration officer and president, a key goal in consolidating Baptist Health’s physicians was to improve health outcomes in communities and build a culture of working together.
“With that focus, we needed to build a structure that would allow us to have consistency in our patient experience measures, our quality measures and our performance measures,” he said.
“You needed a bandwidth of leaders that could work across the system to work with the doctors in the markets,” said Dr. Myers.
Baptist Health Medical Group is part of Baptist Health, a Louisville-based health system delivering care in Kentucky, southern Indiana and neighboring states. The Baptist Health system consists of 10 hospitals, eight owned and two joint ventures.
Baptist Health Medical Group is a member of the AMA Health System Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
For the past four years, the medical group has operated as a high-performing organization, guided by industry benchmarks developed by the Health Care Advisory Board’s 15 attributes of high performance and the Advisory Board’s stages of development for a medical group. Baptist Health is now building on this progress in the final phases of this growth: aligning individual behaviors with strategy and leveraging the enterprise for care redesign.
The medical group also monitors its progress through a dashboard of quality and patient experience metrics, such as breast cancer and colon cancer screening, managing patients with diabetes, advance care planning and access to care, including wait times for patients.
Baptist Health performs in the top decile in these clinical quality measures, which align with Medicare’s value-based care measures and are endorsed by the National Quality Forum.
Meanwhile, its 13 service lines representing over 75 physician specialties allow doctors and other health professionals to work across the system to improve health outcomes. A central call center and AI-activated digital health tools are two other features designed to improve the patient experience at Baptist Health.
In an interview, Dr. Myers discussed the 10th anniversary of Baptist Health Medical Group and the multiple steps and collaborative efforts it took to build a thriving organization.
AMA: What inspired you to pursue a career in medicine?
Dr. Myers: Around age 6 I said I wanted to be a doctor, and I never wavered from that. I thought I wanted to be a general surgeon and applied for general surgery residency. Probably a month or two before the match in general surgery, I did a rotation in Indianapolis at a geriatric facility. I saw a lot of polypharmacy and elders not getting the kind of attention they needed. I was working with the chairman of the family practice department, and it changed my whole perspective. I didn't want to be a surgeon anymore. I wanted to be a family doctor or a geriatrician.
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AMA: Baptist Health Medical Group celebrated its 10th anniversary on Jan. 1, 2025. What does it mean to reach 10 years as a unified medical group?
Dr. Myers: It’s so exciting. There was so much work that went into becoming a consolidated medical group. If you look back to the 1990s when hospitals were integrating with physicians, Baptist had the insight to go down that path, to start employing physicians.
Over time, we realized that based on our size and growth, to build the best efficiency we needed to consolidate under one medical group. We had a consulting firm come in to look at how we were set up as an organization and validate the recommendation to become one medical group.
This started in 2012–2013, and I came in 2014. I was previously with the Franciscan Health System, which is a larger health system. And we went through that same thing several years prior where we had 13 hospitals and decided to consolidate under one medical group. I was aware of the challenges and experiences. It was exciting to come to Baptist with that background knowledge of what needed to be done to work toward putting the medical group together.
One of the unique things that we've done as a medical group is to empower our physician leaders. You want physicians to understand their role as an administrator. All our physician leaders have an executive coach who helps the physicians manage the challenges of administration but also the challenges in life.
They can talk privately with the coach about all those types of things and get advice to really help them do well. I feel that's something that has strengthened us as a health system and made us so successful and has led us to the high performance and standards that we have as a medical group.
AMA: How did you help form Baptist Health Medical Group?
Dr. Myers: It took a lot of meetings and time with the leadership structure across the system. Everybody was very committed to making sure that the medical group got started on a solid foundation. We laid out a plan of all the things that we needed to do, from how do we build a central billing and coding system, to what our governance structure and our electronic medical record system needed to look like.
And we started all that planning and just had meeting after meeting. Groups were formed, tied to the different subject matters. We started working through all the things that we needed to do with our legal counsel and our tax ID, and how we were going to handle our medical liability insurance coverage across the system.
There were multiple committees. We assigned different leaders to help with those committees. We had a timeline that we monitored to make sure we stayed on task. By January 2015, we were able to formalize ourselves as one medical group.
Through my prior experience, I was able to communicate all the things that needed to be done, and the challenges that we were going to face as a medical group. For instance, we had to take all the employed doctors who were formerly with our hospital entities and put them under a whole different leadership structure. That takes some transition. That’s also a big change for the physicians and nurse practitioners who are used to working with another entity. And you have to allow time for that adjustment.
AMA: How has the medical group evolved over the last decade?
Dr. Myers: One of the things that I'm most proud of is we wanted to be a physician-led organization—we have physician leaders that help drive change across the medical group. We've got 13 service lines, different disciplines from general surgery to neurosurgery to orthopedics. It’s really nice to see the physicians lead and drive the change around patient care outcomes and improvement.
What’s been a big piece is the focus on quality and performance and patient outcomes and services. There's great integration with the providers. We have regional leadership councils that meet monthly and go over our performance and talk about what we need to do.
We set goals and metrics on how we're going to track and trend our outcomes. It’s a very well-oiled machine. We’re at a stage where the physicians really see that they are leading the system in performance and improvement.
It’s also important to note the collaboration that occurs among our physician leaders, clinical staff and administrative leaders. We all work very well together as a health system, and that has led to our success.
AMA: Aside from practicing medicine, what are some of your other passions?
Dr. Myers: When my mother died in 1992, it was a pretty devastating time. Because of her background, being a woman with a third-grade education, I wanted to write her life story. When I started writing, her life story was still too painful, too raw, too close to her death. And I decided, maybe what I'll do is write a short story and then eventually get into writing her life story.
Well, I started writing a short story, and five years later I completed my first novel, Silence. I ended up writing the sequel to the novel, The Find, and then, finally, I ended up writing her life story, Mama Through My Eyes. I really enjoy writing. I find it relaxing. It was interesting that I went down the path of writing fiction, because I mostly enjoy reading autobiographies and true stories. I did build a lot of true stuff into the fiction with the characters and different communities that I wanted people to learn about through my writing, though.
AMA: How did you get involved in fashion and design?
Dr. Myers: I had a good friend who wanted to be a fashion designer. I’d go over to his house and he's sewing and stuff, and I’d help him. I learned the craft of tailoring and sewing. I started designing stuff, and making skirts for my sister and my mother.
When I went away to college, I worked at a dry cleaner doing alterations, and I made money designing evening gowns. It became kind of a hobby and something that I got good at. While in college, I also designed and made my sister’s wedding dress and made wedding dresses for two college friends. Most recently, I made my niece’s wedding dress, and now I’m working on a design for her sister.
AMA: What is your hope for the medical group for the next 10 years?
Dr. Myers: That we remain a high-performing medical group. That we continue to focus on the health of our communities and with the advancements in health care, have great outcomes from patient care and patient experience. That’s my hope for the future.
