From Spreadsheets to a Single Source of Truth: How Impact Physician Group Centralized Contractor Payroll with Wingspan

Overview

Impact Physician Group is a growing physician services organization providing physician and advanced practice provider coverage across more than 60 facilities nationwide. The group's footprint spans inpatient rehab facilities, long-term acute care hospitals, behavioral health facilities, nursing homes, and skilled nursing facilities. Its physicians cover internal medicine, cardiology, pulmonology, psychiatry, and several other specialties. The business has grown roughly 20% year over year, adding new facilities, new specialties, and new physicians. That footprint spans multiple states, and the operational complexity grows right alongside it.

That growth runs through a workforce split between W-2 advanced practice providers and 1099 physicians. As Chief Financial Officer, Eriberto Cervantes oversees far more than accounting: cash flow forecasting, payroll and contractor payments, revenue cycle performance, and lender reporting. Contractor payments are a significant expense at Impact Physician Group, and getting them right sits squarely with him. "We have to make sure that the right person is paid the right amount at the right time," Eriberto says, "while also maintaining the documentation and controls around those payments."

Challenge

Before Wingspan, Impact Physician Group ran contractor payments through WorkMarket, an ADP product. “It's not as robust, not as tech-forward as Wingspan has been,” Eriberto says.

The bigger issue wasn't the software alone. It was how many people the payment process ran through before a physician got paid. “There was a lot of administrative burden around contractors, and it was spread across different people and different processes,” Eriberto says. “Information would originate with ops, then payroll, then finance, or the providers themselves.” Every handoff created an opening for questions, errors, and exceptions, and no single person owned the full picture end to end.

Support made the problem worse when something went wrong. Working with a large incumbent meant getting in a queue. “You're thrown into a queue, and it may take one or two business days to even get an answer,” Eriberto says. “You're talking about somebody's livelihood, their payroll, that they heavily rely on. Not getting an answer quickly just creates complexity to an already complex part of our business.”

Solution

Eriberto came in with early conviction that Wingspan could solve what WorkMarket couldn't. "The thesis around being able to offer 1099 workers the same benefits as a W-2 employee was resonating with me," he says. Between the chance to modernize the tech stack, reduce hands-on administrative work, and finally offer contractors real financial benefits, Wingspan checked the boxes he was looking for.

Implementation went smoothly. Impact Physician Group's operations team's main job was getting physicians signed up on the new platform, made harder only by timing. The group had moved onto WorkMarket about a year earlier, so doctors were being asked to switch systems again. Wingspan's signup process cut through that friction. “You guys made it very easy for them to do it within minutes,” Eriberto says. “We were connected with one of your implementation personnel who really held our hands, walked us through the whole process. I was surprised how easy it was.”

Today, Eriberto runs contractor payroll himself. Physician pay follows three distinct compensation structures. Some physicians are paid by RVU, short for relative value unit, a standard measure in healthcare that assigns a dollar value to each service a provider performs based on its complexity and the time it takes. Others are paid a non-APP RVU rate, the same RVU-based structure but calculated separately for physicians rather than the practice's advanced practice providers, or APPs (nurse practitioners and physician assistants). A third group is paid a flat daily rate, regardless of how many services they perform that day. All of it is calculated across more than 16,000 individual records in Power BI, a data analysis tool Impact Physician Group uses to run those numbers. Eriberto takes the finished payroll figures out of Power BI and uploads them directly into Wingspan for processing. The operations team's involvement is limited to onboarding new physicians and pointing them toward the benefits available on the platform. "But aside from that, they don't really have to do it a lot," Eriberto says.

Impact

One Source of Truth

"I think the biggest benefit of the platform for us has been the centralization of our payroll process with contractors and the self-service," Eriberto says. "Rather than having the contractor payment process live across spreadsheets, emails, and different internal teams, the whole workflow is centralized. We have one source of truth, and it gives us the ability to have simple, basic administrative activities around that."

Control and Visibility

Impact Physician Group's biweekly payroll run generates a payroll accounting upload of more than $766,000, of which over $752,000 is physician compensation, adding up to roughly $1.6 million a month, a number that continues to grow alongside the business. Every one of those uploads balances to the penny: zero dollars in debit and credit variance, cycle after cycle. Wingspan gave Eriberto real-time visibility into that spend for the first time. 'It was really three things for us,' he says. 'Better control and visibility, reporting that can scale with the business, and the contractor experience.

Support That Answers the Same Day

A payables upload error and a wire instruction change that briefly returned funds both came up after launch, and both got resolved quickly. “I don't think we've encountered a challenge that wasn't addressed rather quickly by Wingspan,” Eriberto says. “You guys are more nimble. You guys were more on top of making sure things were working correctly.”

A Better Experience for Physicians

Since launch, contractor-side support issues haven't made their way back to Eriberto, which he reads as a strong signal. “I would say, because I have not heard any issues, it's positive,” he says. “I'm assuming they are either reaching out to your team and getting that managed, nor am I hearing from the ops team that their contractors are complaining. It's been pretty easy. Everything has been working as seamlessly as it can be.”

Looking Forward

Impact Physician Group's contractor count is small next to some Wingspan customers, but the pay amounts are large given how much each physician earns. The roster keeps growing too, with a handful more facilities coming online this month alone. Eriberto's focus going forward is deeper automation: using Wingspan's APIs to build payroll directly into Impact Physician Group's tech stack, so the process runs with no manual hands touching it at all. Wingspan's upcoming MCP connector, an AI agent integration built to require no engineering background, may close that gap sooner than Eriberto expects.

He's also interested in continuing to expand what Wingspan can offer contractors directly. “The contractors feel a little bit more love when you offer them these types of opportunities,” he says, “benefits that they don't otherwise get because they're not W-2 employees.”

Eriberto's take on the partnership so far is simple. “You don't hear from me because everything is working great,” he says. “Appreciate you guys' support.”

See why leading physician services organizations trust Wingspan to handle contractor onboarding, payments, 1099s, and compliance at scale. Request a Demo →