Words to live by.

Jim Davis set out to 'just have fun,' and ended up becoming the largest publisher of medical management books in the country

Scott Adams, the author of the comic strip sensation "Dilbert," would have a hard time making fun of Jim Davis, owner and CEO of Los Angeles-based Practice Management Information Corp.

As much as Dilbert's world is filled with corporate double-speak - downsizing, outsourcing. hoteling and endless meetings where nothing much gets accomplished - Davis' world is filled with plain speaking and quick thinking.

"I have no business plan, I have no mission statement, I have no target for sales and I have no budget," says Davis. "I just want to have fun."

A look at the corporation's balance sheet shows that Davis must be having lots of it. Since he started PMIC as a one-man publishing concern in 1986, revenues have climbed from $15,000 annually to a projected $13 million-plus this year.

Ten years ago, nearly two-thirds of revenue was pure profit. Today, with the overhead of an office and 45 employees, that margin, while much less, is "very healthy," Davis says. Citing competitive reasons, he declines to reveal PMIC's actual profits.

According to a recent report in Publishers Weekly, PMIC is now the largest publisher of medical management books in the United States. PMIC currently has more than 200 titles in print, all of them geared to help doctors manage their practices.

Subjects range from listings of the correct codes to submit to identify diagnoses to private insurance carriers and Medicaid and Medi-Cal, to how to compute the market value of a medical practice.

The driving force behind PMIC's revenue growth has been books based on information in the public domain. Chief among them is the "International Classification of Diseases," known in the trade as ICD-9-CM.

Hardly a book you'd take to the beach, it had, and still has today, a characteristic that makes it a steady earner: Every physician's office or practice in the country needs an updated version every year. In 1938, the federal government mandated that codes found in ICD-9-CM had to be used in all medical claims.

"All of the information in the book is available from the federal government, so anyone can publish it," Davis notes. "But we re-packaged it and made it more user-friendly."

By paying attention to little details, like designing a book that is color-coded, thumb-indexed and in a binding that would keep the book open to the page selected by the user, PMIC's ICD-9-CM sales quickly dominated the market.

Focus on the book's design was a result of Davis' business background. Before getting into medical publishing, Davis was a partner in a medical billing company.

"I knew what the billing-world was like. I knew that they were using this information all day, every day. So we developed a book that was easier to use than the others."

Currently, PMIC sells nearly 50 percent of the ICD-9-CMs sold nationally, according to Davis. In the first few years in business, before PMIC started generating its own titles by its own authors, public domain-based publications accounted for 100 percent of PMIC's revenues. This year, they account for 40 percent of revenues.

However, that balance could swing back toward a bulk of revenues coming from public domain publications.

Pending the outcome of a recent lawsuit that PMIC brought against the American Medical Association, another of PMIC's staple annual books, the "Physician's Current Procedural Terminology," or CPT, could become part of the public domain.

Since 1986, PMIC has had to pay the AMA more than $3 million a year for the information in the book. If PMIC's position prevails, Davis says his company's bottom line would explode upward to the tune of $3 million, given current market share and price.

At last count, PMIC sold 25 percent of all CPT books in the United States.

In the early 1990s PMIC grew rapidly enough to twice make Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States. In the past couple of years, PMIC hasn't made the list because its revenue growth has flattened.

"The medical world is a finite market," says Davis. "We've gone just about as far as we can go."

To continue growing the company, Davis announced in April the formation of a new imprint, Health Information Press, to try to tap into increasing consumer demand for health-care related books.

"Doctors and hospitals have all the information they need, but patients don't. In fact, a lot of them are confused as to their options," says Davis. HIP has three books on its list, one of which, "Medicare Made Simple," is now available in bookstores.

"With consumer books, prices are lower and discounts are higher than professional books," says Davis. "I have to sell a lot of books."

Spotlight

Practice Management Inc.

Year Founded: 1986

Headquarters: Park Mile

Core Business: Publishing coding, reimbursement and practice management books for the medical profession.

Employees in 1991: 30

Employees in 1996: 45

Revenues in 1991: $8.5 million

Revenues in 1996 (est): $13 million-plus

CEO and Owner: James B. Davis 

Driving force: Finding creative, user-friendly ways of presenting published materials.