Los Angeles-based Commons Clinic is taking aim at healthcare consolidation with a venture-backed, physician-owned model that shifts surgeries to ASCs and lowers costs through bundled pricing.
“It’s basically raising money from investors to build a new kind of health system,” Prem Ramkumar, MD, medical director of technology and clinical innovation and a hip and knee surgeon at the organization, told Becker’s. “But unlike big nonprofits, we know we fail if our doctors aren’t happy. Our success depends entirely on physicians thriving, and patients having a better experience.”
Commons Clinic was founded in 2021 to give private practice physicians an alternative to hospital employment or private equity acquisition, uniting them under a physician-led model focused on transparency, cost control and patient-centered care.
Dr. Ramkumar said one of the biggest problems for healthcare providers today is loss of autonomy.
“There’s a lot not going well in medicine,” he said. “Being able to control your own schedule — your day-to-day autonomy — is really important. In an academic system, you’re a corporate employee. At Commons, you’re in control of your own franchise. You decide how hard you want to work, and you reap the dividends of that effort.”
That independence extends to how physicians grow their practices and engage with patients. At Commons, doctors can adjust their workload, shape their personal digital and outreach strategies and decide when to scale back, flexibility seldom found in traditional health systems.
“At Commons, physicians own their world,” Dr. Ramkumar said. “We’re equal stakeholders alongside investors. No one owns UCLA Health or Cedars-Sinai. Here, the physicians own the system itself — the same level of preferred stock as capital investors.”
He said that alignment ensures doctors remain motivated to deliver high-quality, efficient care while keeping patients at the center.
“If doctors hate it and leave, the business fails,” he said. “So it only works if the doctors believe in it, and patients have a great experience.”
Patients also benefit from transparent bundled pricing, particularly in orthopedic surgery.
“If a total knee replacement costs $50,000 at a big hospital, we can do it for $30,000 at our surgical center,” Dr. Ramkumar said. “The payer saves, the patient saves and the surgeon earns more for taking on the risk.”
Dr. Ramkumar described Commons as a physician-driven, scalable model that gives private practice doctors “a chance to actually fight back against consolidation.”
“It’s not just going to be orthopedics,” he said. “It’s going to be GI, cardiology, ASC-based practices in various cities. This is a physician-driven model and a very scalable product — the only counterbalance to these health systems, and it’s very reproducible.”
The approach also depends on savvy payer relationships that help negotiate cost-effective bundled rates, Dr. Ramkumar said.
“The difference between us and isolated private practices or PE models is that they don’t have sharp negotiators with real relationships at PPO or payer plans,” he said. “We actually have those points of contact and can save everyone money.”
He added that payers are increasingly seeking cost-effective alternatives to large health systems with inflated rates — a gap Commons Clinic aims to fill by offering transparent, competitively priced care.
For Dr. Ramkumar, success at Commons isn’t about size or branding, it’s about satisfaction for both physicians and patients.
“The thing we care about most is patient experience,” he said. “We don’t need our logo displayed at stadiums. We want patients who are happy and physicians who feel in control of their system.”
Looking ahead, Commons Clinic plans to expand beyond Southern California and apply its physician-led model to new specialties.
Dr. Ramkumar said the next phase is about scale, proving that independent physicians can deliver high-value care without relying on traditional health system structures.
“There’s plenty of research that shows physician-led medicine is a better experience and more cost effective,” he said. “When physicians understand day-to-day operations and patient experience, everyone benefits — the doctors, the patients and the system as a whole.”
