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About Us
Covenant Medical Group "Caring for the people of our Region"

Our Region:

Covenant Medical Group is headquartered in Lubbock, Texas, the site of the Southwest's preeminent medical center between the Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex and Phoenix. With a county population of 250,000 and serving an area of 1.2 million people in the region, Lubbock has many of the amenities of a large metropolitan area, international airport, great shopping and restaurants, and excellent public and private schools, yet retaining a wonderful "small-town" atmosphere.

It is blessed with a major university, Texas Tech, which adds much to our quality of life with Big 12 Conference sporting events, and a variety of cultural, and academic activities. Texas Tech University School of Medicine adds high quality continuing medical education and research to our region. Covenant Medical Group has no formal residency training programs of its own, but several of our physicians volunteer their time for medical student and resident training via a Texas Tech association.

Our health system's regional clinics are located throughout West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. These clinics are located in a variety of geographic areas; from rolling ranchland, to high plateau farmland, to desert oil fields, to river valleys with nearby Rocky Mountains. This area of regional clinics extends 100 to 175 miles from Lubbock and covers a 63,000 square mile area. There are two beautiful National Parks (Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains), a scenic ski resort community (Ruidoso, New Mexico), and Texas's largest state park (Palo Duro) within our regional clinic service area. Our regional clinic network contains several operational different models. Some are directly owned and operated by CMG; some are Rural Health Clinics in which CMG supplies its employed physicians to work for a rural hospital-owned facility; some are Rural Health Clinics in which the physicians are independent contractors; and some are satellite clinic sites to which CMG subspecialists travel a few times per month. These regional clinics are integral to the provision of primary care services to their local communities, and also send substantial numbers of patients to Lubbock for tertiary care that is not available locally.

Our area's true strength is its people. They are spiritual, caring, proud, independent, and exhibit a strong work ethic. Our unemployment rate is typically in the 2 to 3% range. Our economy is diverse, with elements associated with mechanized agriculture, the petroleum industry, distribution centers, high tech entities, as well as strong elements based on higher education and healthcare. Its diversity and provincial nature typically allows it to remain somewhat insulated from the wide swinging cycles of the national economy.

Our weather features an average of 18 inches of precipitation annually, low humidity, and plenty of sunshine which encourages our population to engage in outdoor activities. Our 3,500 foot elevation tends to make for cool mornings and evenings even during a hot summer, and rarely do we experience persistent snow or ice. For those who enjoy winter and mountain sports, we are convenient to the Rocky Mountain resorts of Ruidoso and Santa Fe, New Mexico. For those that enjoy big city weekend activities and professional sports, we are 50 minutes from Dallas and 90 minutes from Houston by air.

Covenant Medical Group is a non-profit, tax-exempt medical foundation that is certified under Texas law to employ physicians and practice medicine. It is owned by Covenant Health System, but is self-governing in most aspects, other than fiscal matters. There is a Board of 12 physicians who provide the oversight of the group's strategic planning, policy development, recruitment and credentialling, quality improvement tasks, research, and medical education activities. All of the Board members are actively practicing within CMG. This self-governing aspect of CMG tends to make it quite physician-friendly in its policy development and planning in that the Board members are immediately personally impacted in their own practice by their Board decisions.

Our Administration includes: Steve McCamy (President and Chief Executive Officer), Kristen Kothmann (Vice President and Chief Operating Officer), and seven Directors. CMG is by far the area's largest medical group with more than 200 providers in approximately 26 specialties including 20 mid-level practitioners.

We do an excellent job of recruiting new physicians, retaining them in our service area, and integrating them into our overall group practice. In our fourteen years of operation we have recruited over 100 new physicians to our area. In summary, we are the largest, most geographically dispersed, highest quality, and most prestigious medical group to ever exist in our region of the US.

Our Specialties:

We currently have members practicing in the following specialties. CMG operates as an integrated group practice from a referral standpoint. We allow our patients in consultation with their physician to be the primary decision-maker regarding referrals for the tertiary care that cannot be provided in their local community.

Our Physician Employment Model:

Although technically the physicians in CMG are employed by the group, we refer to them as "members" and strive to treat them in a self-empowered, physician-friendly, and supportive manner. CMG created a sophisticated practice infrastructure to relieve the physician from the hassles of practice management, payer mix selectivity, managed care negotiations, employee recruitment, governmental regulation compliance, capitalization of medical office space and equipment, etc.

We want our physicians to focus their time and full attention on the clinical practice of medicine, which is stressful enough, without having to deal directly with the confusing myriad of medical business issues that confronts most self-employed physicians. We certainly accept active physician-member input on business issues, but do not routinely demand their direct involvement, unless they choose to become a Board member or Committee member.

We compensate our physicians within a fair-market-value analysis, based on their practice productivity for personally performed services. Thus, they are somewhat protected from payer-mix, collection rates, managed care reimbursement, and evolving practice expense issues. We use the MGMA survey and the consulting expertise of Cejka to arrive at our annual salaries.

A generous benefits package is also available to each member which includes health insurance, dental insurance, medical liability insurance with $1 million / $3 million coverage, disability insurance, life insurance, a three level retirement plan which includes corporate matching funds, reimbursement for professional expenses and moving expenses, and paid time off for illness, vacation, and CME.

CMG feels that its salary and benefits package and other value-added services have been key factors in our long-term success as a huge, multi-specialty, geographically dispersed, medical group. In other words, while it is great to be a member of the area's largest and most prestigious medical group, it is also nice to be well compensated for the very hard work innate to the practice of modern medicine.

Summary:

We feel that west Texas and southeastern New Mexico are great places to live and work, Covenant Health System is a premier entity with national size and image, and Covenant Medical Group is one of the Southwest's finest multi-site, multi-specialty physician groups. We welcome your thoughtful inquiries regarding potential membership in our organization, as we strive to better serve the medical needs of our region's people. Our physician recruiter is Kelly Fortney at 806-725-7875 or .