Dr. Tiffany Nelson co-founded Desert Ridge Family Physicians (DRFP) in Scottsdale in 2004, driven by a desire to address the healthcare needs of the growing underserved population in the area. With careful planning and a dedicated team of advisors, Nelson successfully established DRFP, which quickly gained a reputation for its patient-friendly approach and elite medical care.
Later, Nelson recognized the need for a larger organization to improve patient care across the community. In 2012, she spearheaded the launch of Innovation Care Partners, a clinically integrated network made up of more than 2,000 physicians collaborating with HonorHealth hospitals. As the chief strategy officer and later the CEO, Nelson played a key role in growing ICP to its current stature, managing almost 200,000 patient lives and securing multiple insurance contracts.
“As a healthcare leader involved in two organizations, the most important risk that I took was moving to part-time work at Desert Ridge Family Physicians to start and lead Innovation Care Partners (ICP),” Nelson said. “I firmly believed (that) to improve patient care across the continuum in our community and for my private practice to be sustainable, our practice needed to be part of a larger transformational organization to make the biggest impact.
“It was important to me to have a leader that had a passion for helping people and practices thrive, which helped me make the decision when ICP couldn’t find that leader to step away from a job that I loved — seeing patients full-time to lead the organization that had the potential to improve collaborative care for patients and physicians across a larger community.”
Under Nelson’s leadership, DRFP became known for its patient-centric approach, offering same-day and next-day appointments, telehealth services and integrated behavioral health counseling.
Nelson has received numerous accolades, including being named a Top Doctor in Family Medicine by Phoenix Magazine and US News and World Report. Desert Ridge Family Physicians has been honored with NextGen’s Best Small Practice Award, and Nelson has been invited to the White House and recognized as a Health IT Fellow for her leadership and innovation in healthcare.
“The accomplishment that I am most proud of is acquiring and rolling out a technology solution that enables physicians to easily and securely communicate amongst each other about patient care which now processes over 250,000 texts per month, drastically improving the efficiency and care for our patients,” Nelson said. “It remains a very simple solution with high impact.
“Additionally, I am extremely proud of the Covid response that I led in both organizations. At Desert Ridge Family Physicians, we were able to quickly stand-up telehealth and open a separate location with a sick clinic in order to safely provide medical care to our patients and remain open for the entirety of the pandemic. We also set up weekend vaccination clinic hours and provided over 5,000 Covid vaccines to our patients.”
