Doctor returns to practice after two decades on the business side of health care

CARTHAGE — After nearly two decades of working on the business side of health care, Ancy Kunnumpurath, M.D., has returned to be a practicing physician. She is an internist at Carthage Family Health Center, a unit of Carthage Area Hospital.

In 1998, Kunnumpurath and her husband Francis, a CPA, founded SpectraMedi Transcription Services, a nationwide company headquartered in Syracuse. She says she stopped practicing medicine and helped her husband, working in quality control, so that she could have more time to raise their young children.

Kunnumpurath tells CNYBJ she has returned to practicing medicine now that her children are older and out of the house and because it’s what she likes to do best.

Kunnumpurath says SpectraMedi Transcription Services grew quickly because there was a large need for transcription services at hospitals around the U.S. Doctors sent in audio recordings or dictated orally patient records to a transcriptionist, which could be based anywhere in the country, and that transcriptionist would type the report. At its peak, Kunnumpurath says SpectraMedi Transcription was generating more than $2 million in annual revenue, but since the growth of electronic medical records (EMR), the company has seen a substantial drop in revenue. She declined to say how much. SpectraMedi Transcription is still owned by her husband, though Kunnumpurath has stepped away from the business.

As for the transition back to practicing medicine, she says her job at SpectraMedi Transcription was medically related, which helped her stay up-to-date even though she wasn’t working as a physician. When transcriptionists didn’t understand parts of medical recordings, Kunnumpurath says she would fill in the blanks, which also helped her stay informed about medicine while she wasn’t practicing. She also became a certified medical coder. Reading medical journals on a daily basis further helped her stay current and made it easier to go back into practicing medicine.

Kunnumpurath says she always knew she was going to practice medicine again, so she remained board-certified by taking exams every 10 years. She also recently took a 12-week course, the “Physician Refresher/Re-entry Program” at the Drexel University College of Medicine, which she says is similar to a residency program. The course included inpatient and outpatient clinical rotations in multiple specialties, case management, daily academic conferences, clinical assessments, and lessons on ethics and doctor-patient communications, according to a Carthage Area Hospital news release.

Kunnumpurath says since she started seeing patients again on June 8, she sees about 10 patients per day. Before she took her practicing hiatus, Kunnumpurath would treat about 20 to 25 people daily. She’s gradually building up her patient base and notes that learning EMR has been the biggest hurdle for her and has been time consuming.

As a board-certified internist at Carthage Family Health Center, Kunnumpurath mostly works as a primary care physician, treating the all-around health of a patient, including managing chronic conditions and diagnosing illnesses.

Kunnumpurath is a 1992 graduate of Mahatma Gandhi University School of Medical Education in Kottayam, India. Following medical school, she completed a year of rotating clinical internship in internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, orthopedics, OB/GYN, and public health, the release stated. Kunnumpurath completed a three-year residency in internal medicine at United Hospital in Newark, New Jersey in 1996 and began practice in New York state the following year.               ν