Wilson Smoothly Navigates Choppy Health Care Waters

As CEO of Medical Associates of Northwest Arkansas, Jason K. Wilson is tasked with guiding the physician-owned medical group through the uncharted waters of Obamacare.

“So much of it was undefined,” he said about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that President Obama signed into law in 2010. “We’re constantly seeing new regulations coming out dealing with different aspects of the bill.”

MANA, as the physician group is known, is trying to figure out what will happen next year when most people will be required to have health insurance, Wilson said. One big question is how that will affect the number of patients trying to gain access to the health care system.

“Have those people already been accessing the system just as self-paid patients that will now have insurance,” he said, “or is there pent-up demand out there because they haven’t had insurance and haven’t been accessing the system?”

Complicating matters even more, he said, is facing possible cuts to Medicaid each year.

“It’s very difficult to plan further than a year out when you don’t know what your reimbursements are going to be,” he said.

But Wilson, 43, appears calm and unflappable while discussing these issues at MANA’s administrative offices off North Futrall Drive in Fayetteville. Wilson said MANA deals with these uncertainties by trying to be as cost-efficient as possible in delivering quality health care.

Measures the group has taken to contain costs include practicing economies of scale, such as creating a central purchasing department for all the clinics and consolidating functions like IT and accounting.

Despite the obstacles, though, MANA has continued to grow while remaining independent, a fact Wilson is proud of.

“Through the years, we’ve been able to maintain being an independent physician-owned group, whereas you’ve seen a lot of clinics and physicians join hospital systems or selling to other entities,” he said.

“Our whole goal, when we started pulling MANA together in the late ‘90s, was to remain independent, and we’ve been successful at that.”

Instrumental in forming MANA in 2000, Wilson was the group’s chief financial officer when he was named to the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s Forty under 40 class of 2007.

He was promoted to CEO in 2010, and since then, MANA has added 10 doctors, several nurse practitioners, two medical specialty departments and two family practice locations. It also has expanded its primary-care services into Benton County.

MANA now has 74 doctors, 500 employees and 18 clinics in Northwest Arkansas.

Last year, Wilson was named administrator of the year by the Arkansas Medical Group Management Association.

Becoming a health care administrator wasn’t exactly on Wilson’s radar when the University of Arkansas graduate started his career as an accountant with Baird, Kurtz and Dobson.

His clients included several medical practices in Northwest Arkansas, including Fayetteville Diagnostic Clinic. When the clinic’s CFO left in 1995, Wilson was offered the position.

In his three years doing public accounting, Wilson said, he’d always liked the audit side of the business more than the tax side.

“Having an opportunity to get into a business and deal with the accounting of just that business was attractive,” he said.

The clinic was one of the three physician practices that combined to form MANA. The other two were Northwest Arkansas Pediatric Clinic and FirstCare Family Doctors.

Over the next 10 years, MANA doubled the number of its doctors and clinics, and added urgent care, imaging services and gynecology.  It also opened the state’s first independent facility dedicated solely to breast imaging.

When he’s not working, Wilson serves on many committees at Central United Methodist Church, and enjoys going to Razorback sporting events and working in his yard. But most of his personal time is spent with his teenage son and daughter and staying involved with their activities.

Despite the challenges of his job, Wilson finds satisfaction in handling the day-to-day business side of MANA so the doctors are free to focus on what they spent years training to do — serving patients.

Besides, “it’s fun,” he said. “Every day is different. I never know when I get here in the morning what the day will bring.”