CEP America

CEP America

Founded in 1975 by a group of emergency physicians including Wesley Curry, CEP America (California Emergency Physicians) started as a small partnership staffing a single ED in the Bay Area. It grew organically for four decades by winning hospital contracts and converting physicians from employees to partners — an ownership structure that distinguished it from staffing firms where doctors are hired guns. By 2015, the partnership had grown to roughly 2,600 clinicians across emergency and acute-care specialties. In 2015, CEP America merged with MedAmerica, its longtime management-services organization, and rebranded the combined entity as Vituity (per the firm's official communications, 2015). The merger operationalized a model where physician partners own the practice and vote on governance while MedAmerica/Vituity provides billing, technology, and administrative infrastructure. The organization covers emergency medicine, hospital medicine, critical care, anesthesiology, psychiatry, and telehealth across more than 400 practice locations, primarily in community hospitals. The partnership operates in California, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic, with a concentration in HCA Healthcare and Sutter Health facilities alongside independent community systems. The partnership, now branded under Vituity, reports approximately 5,500 clinicians, including 1,400 physician partners, as of recent public disclosures. CEP America no longer operates as a standalone brand — the legal entity and contract portfolio were subsumed into Vituity's structure following the 2015 merger. Vituity's governance remains structured as a partnership: physicians buy in after a trial period, share in profits, and elect regional and national leadership. The organization maintains a philanthropic arm, the Vituity Cares Foundation, which directs charitable giving toward community health initiatives. CEP America's structural legacy — and Vituity's defining differentiator — is the physician-partnership model itself. Unlike publicly traded staffing companies such as TeamHealth or Envision, where clinicians are W-2 employees beholden to shareholder returns, Vituity physicians are equity partners who control practice decisions and share in the economics. The partnership governance creates a built-in retention mechanism absent from most contract-staffing competitors. This architecture, directly inherited from CEP America's 1975 partnership agreement, is the single largest physician-owned acute-care practice in the United States.