Paul Bierman, MD, can’t remember a time in his life when he didn’t want to be a doctor. His parents told him that as early as age 5 he said that’s what he planned to be.
So it served him well that early on he developed a strong work ethic. When his parents moved the family from New York City to upstate New York and bought a farm – because they didn’t think the big city was a good place to raise children – young Paul stayed busy feeding chickens, collecting eggs and selling them at a roadside stand.
When he was a teenager, the family moved to Miami and bought a restaurant, so Paul had jobs as a busboy, a short-order cook and a dishwasher.
“I always worked, even when I was a little kid,” Bierman said. “Either a paper route or working at the corner grocery . . . one thing my dad instilled in us was to work. That’s one of the gifts he gave me that I hope I can pass on to my children.”
Bierman, a gastroenterologist at Gastrointestinal Specialists Foundation, has flourished for 19 years in Memphis, a city that he never would have thought he’d call home, given that he was strictly an East Coast guy until he was well into his 20s.
He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, then stayed in Philadelphia to attend medical school. Halfway finished, and now married to his wife, Kara, he returned to Miami to finish his medical degree so they could help care for his ailing father-in-law.
After his residency and fellowship at the University of Miami, Bierman was applying for jobs, mostly in the East. Then came his last interview, a phone call from his future partner, Dr. Isaac Jalfon.
“He wouldn’t tell me where he was from,” Bierman said. “I kept pushing him and pushing him, ‘where are you?’ We really hit it off and talked for an hour and a half. Finally he said ‘Memphis.’”
Neither he nor Kara knew much about Memphis, but he took the job because Jalfon told him that if he came and worked hard, he’d be a partner in two years. Jalfon was true to his word.
“It worked out wonderfully,” Bierman said. “I’m so lucky that I ended up in Memphis. What a great community, very family-centric, a lot of moral values and people who really appreciate what you do for them.”
It was also important to the Biermans that Memphis has a strong Jewish community. Kara is president of Bornblum Jewish Community School and previously served as president of the Jewish Community Center.
Bierman hadn’t always set his sights on being a gastroenterologist. He originally wanted to be a surgeon.
“But the more I got to understand the role of the surgeon,” he said, “I realized I’d have less patient contact, and I really enjoy communicating with patients and helping and caring. Not that surgeons don’t do that, but they tend to have more of a technical line of work.
“I realized I could have the best of both worlds because I do surgery and procedures that are very, very technical, but I can still spend half my time in clinic, to be in a room with patients talking about their bowel problem, indigestion, abdominal pain, bloating – all the human stuff – but I can still do the technical stuff.”
Back in school, when he started doing his rotations, he met a doctor who would be his mentor, Arvey Rogers, chairman of the GI department. Rogers gave him a valuable piece of advice: listen.
“There are a million things that have happened in my life that I don’t remember,” Bierman said, “but I remember sitting there awed when he was talking about the average doctor interrupts their patient within 10 seconds of the conversation, and our real goal was to let the patient tell their story. Listening is 50 percent of the job. It’s something I do to this day, and I think it helps make me a good doctor.”
In his early days in Memphis, Bierman and Jalfon comprised a two-physician practice downtown on Madison Avenue. Reluctantly, they eventually joined the healthcare migration to East Memphis. Over the years they expanded, adding four doctors, a surgery center and a histology lab, to the point where they could do virtually everything in-house. It was an efficient operation, but it wasn’t enough.
Insurance companies kept cutting reimbursements. Medicare kept cutting fees. Modern-day healthcare realities began to sink in. After Jalfon tragically died in 2010, the practice was sold two years ago to Baptist Memorial Healthcare. Gastrointestinal Specialists Foundation is owned by Baptist Medical Group.
Selling the practice was “scary, scary, scary,” Bierman said. “But it turned out to be the best thing we could have done, in terms of healthcare, in terms of delivery, in terms of insurance and economies of scale. Baptist has been an outstanding partner.
“Healthcare right now is very challenging. We realized we could no longer sustain the services because the reimbursements didn’t cover the costs of all the employees and equipment.
“What the government wants to do is form much larger units so there’s cost savings, where you’re part of a large organization and you’re purchasing at such a volume that you get the most discount. We couldn’t do that as a six-man crew. I’m part of a 550-man group and we’re far more integrated now.”
For an East Coast guy, things could hardly have turned out better in Memphis. His three children are thriving – daughter Faryn, 25, lives in Jerusalem; son Logan, 21, just graduated from Indiana University; and son Austin, 17, a junior at Lausanne Collegiate School, just went to the state lacrosse final.
“I have the best, most supportive wife in the entire world,” Bierman said, “and three amazing children. I couldn’t be me without them.”
RELATED LINKS:
Gastrointestinal Specialists Foundation, www.yourgastrodoc.com
Baptist Medical Group, www.baptistmedicalgroup.org