Impacted the businesses and why you see so much volatility and maybe downward pressure in the marketplace itself. One is, you had post-COVID, post-pandemic pent-up demand, and you're seeing that come through now in things like oncology care as well as orthopedic care, where people weren't able to get the preventative care that they needed, and it's put a lot of pressure on utilization, going forward. The second is CMS made some fundamental changes in the way that they funded the business, for senior care. One is something called V28, which they took an old model for doing, risk assessment coding and made a new model called V28, and we're still in the transition of that, so that has downward pressure overall on revenues. CMS recently announced some pressures around Stars that doesn't hit until 2026, but it's another place where you have that, confluence of things.
You're in a market right now where you have still market pressures on cost of capital. When I think about how we would invest previously as a business, the way we do that has changed quite a bit. In the sector itself, those things happening successively in that short period of time is pretty unprecedented. What I believe with this business is it's got a great foundation. What I want you to know is there's lots of movement and activity happening since I arrived here at P3, that will pay dividends in future quarters and years, but some of that takes a little bit of time to get to. Here's all the normal disclaimers that we'll go through just briefly. Who is P3 Health Partners? At a glance, we are really a provider enablement business focused in the Medicare space.
We take care of 126,000 Medicare patients across five states, and we really look at this on a county-by-county basis because that's the way Medicare writes the bids, so we have 27 counties that we're in today. There are 2,900 PCPs in our network, and we have over 20 payer partners that we partner with. We are physician-led. I'm a general surgeon by training. I've been in this business for quite a while. Started out at the Lovelace Health System in the Southwest United States. We ultimately sold to HealthCare Partners. That was ultimately acquired by DaVita, and then DaVita was acquired by Optum.
I spent time in the Southwest as well as the Pacific Northwest with both DaVita Medical Group and Optum, and then went and did a startup based in Nashville with Adam Boehler and Rubicon Founders in the same kind of space, going zero to one, and spent time in Michigan and New York with most of our businesses there. And so I've seen this in different parts of the country and know it's possible. One of the differentiators for us is how we relate to the docs. And so I think that's a really important part of the business, and it's also really important that it's more than like a technology play. You have to convince the clinicians to change their behaviors and then augment things around their practice to ultimately be successful.
If you look at our 2023 numbers, about $1.3 billion in total revenue on the top line, and we generated about $135 million of edical margin. Our goal is to enhance the outcomes of the patients, lower the total cost of care, and improve quality, as well as help with clinician satisfaction, and what that really is is the Quadruple Aim, and everything that we do is tailored around achieving those objectives. So what we provide is a value prop to those docs because that's really our entry into having patients. We have about 10% of our group. We do have employed clinical assets, mainly in Nevada, but we have employed assets in each one of our states. But the vast majority, we're working through a primary care clinician, and they're in our network. So we have to bring something to them that's helpful.
and the things that we think help give them the right incentives to do the work, one is, we provide them with additional resources that they wouldn't have. So like a care manager is an example, like a nurse that can help them take better care of their patients, or we're helping them track down information. We're doing outreach on their behalf to help those patients come in. We also provide data and analytics so they can understand where they need to go and look for opportunities with patient populations that they're taking care of, and those interventions then can reduce the total cost of care. We are partnering with Innovaccer, and we're partway through our implementation now.
That won't go fully live until 2025, but what we're looking for is a more sophisticated solution than what we have today, which is mostly homegrown, and having something that's more at the point of care, and it's quicker, and Innovaccer can do that. In addition, Innovaccer is also investing heavily in artificial intelligence within their business. As a, you know, healthcare delivery company, we're not a technology company. We don't want to pretend to be. We're partnering with someone that we think does a really great job, and they have a good track record of moving things, both in utilization as well as in quality, which is important for our business to be successful.
Part of what we do with all that data is we analyze it, and we look at the patients and stratify them so then we can choose where we're going to point our resources for the patient population. Not everybody needs the same level of care, so the way we think about this is we have our top 5%, top 10%, top 20%. Those patients need a differential amount of touches and outreach and different services than patients who are healthy, and so we don't try to do the same thing for everyone, and that helps us be more capital efficient. We also have delegation for utilization management, so when clinicians are requesting services for prior authorizations to get an MRI or get a procedure, on about half the population, we're delegated for utilization management.
And in that situation, we get another swing at the plate with the PCPs so that we can have a conversation with them about, "Hey, are you sure this patient needs this service, or have you considered this other alternative?" as well as gives us earlier insight into what's happening with the patient population because we get that data upfront, and we're not waiting for claims some 90 days later to be able to tell us what's happened with the population. And then we tailor our care management based on those patient populations and their individual needs so the patients have that individualized care plan. And then we empower the clinicians this way because now they're also in control of the healthcare dollar. If they do well, they get a split of the savings with us. So when we think about the flywheel, what's in it for the patients?
The patients themselves, they typically get better access to their clinicians because we help them get in, and we create space with those clinicians through our work groups and being in the offices. They get an individualized care plan that they're not getting today, and ultimately they get better outcomes. So, you know, we have data that we'll show here in just a minute on when you compare to geographically matched cohorts, we have lower inpatient admissions to the hospital, lower usage, lower skilled nursing facility usage than the general population, Medicare population in that area. In terms of the providers, what we provide them are tools and resources, both in terms of technology as well as in people. They also get incentives.
So we pay them to take better care of their patients, through quality incentives that we can give them real-time for the things that they're doing with their patient populations. And if they're able to generate savings, they get to take advantage of that as well. The payers are aligned with this model because they're also interested in higher quality. They're interested in lowering the total cost of care. And so we have that in common. And then as we think about the providers, they don't have the same types of relationships that we do with the PCPs. And a big part of this for us that's important is we believe that within an individual PCP's office, having a multi-payer approach makes the most sense because most doctors see multiple insurances in their office on each given day.
And so the more of those that we're able to have in the same arrangement, the more mind share we have of those PCPs. So, physician density, patient density within the physician panels is also really key. The stats I was talking about earlier, you have the, the matched cohorts and the blue lines up above that show what the average admissions to the hospital are, and that's measured in a per thousand basis. So that's where the numbers come from. So the blue line of 228 represents what that average cohort would be in the general population in that geography. And then in, in our geographies, what we're able to achieve with our providers. Same thing for skilled nursing facilities, and same thing for ED admits per K.
And that's really just being focused on those patients who are going to need those services and being preventative and upfront with proactive outreach on the population to help them get better results. Where we think we are today is, you know, I've been in seat with P3 for about five months. Some of the opportunities that we've seen is an opportunity to refine the network, both from a payer perspective. Some of the payers that we've contracted with may not be achieving their overall goals in terms of quality, and that has a negative impact on the revenue that either of us can see. And then we have some providers that may be too subscale. Maybe they don't have enough patients in their panel to be able to have enough repetition to be able to make that happen.
So you see a slow uptick through 2024 so far on those patients per provider going from the 36 in 2022 to the 45. Those are still meaningful numbers. Our goal is to have that above 50, and ideally, if we can get to 100 patients per PCP, that's when you really get the flywheel working, and the docs kind of get, they're like, "Okay, I'm repeating this thing over and over. I'm seeing the benefit. My patients are seeing the benefit. My pocketbook's seeing the benefit." That's when it gets nice. And in terms of revenue versus medical margin, we see nice growth in medical margin over 2022 to 2024, and we do expect that you know we're going to be able to improve upon what we've done previously with some of the things that we'll talk about in a moment.
Lots of payer partnerships, as we talked about before. And again, we will carefully analyze those, and we've already made some changes to some that aren't on the board anymore. The main markets that we're in: Arizona, Nevada, Northern California, San Joaquin Valley, and Oregon, and today, if you think about the 3,000, roughly 3,000 PCPs that we have in the network, anyone know how many, how many patients are on the average PCP panel? Like, how many patients does an average primary care doc take care of that they would say, "Those are my patients"? Anyone know what that number is? Anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500, that they have chosen that doc to be their patient. Mix of Medicaid, commercial, Medicare, but that's how many that each PCP is responsible for. So let's just say it's 2,000. We have roughly 3,000 PCPs in the network.
Those 3,000 PCPs are caring for 6 million patients. About a third of those, back of the napkin math, are Medicare patients, so they have about 2 million Medicare lives, and today we've only captured about 126,000 of those 2 million potential with the existing docs that we have, so part of the strategy moving forward will be to go deeper with the docs that we have. It's much more capital effective to grow in place with those docs because you don't have to buy new resources, build new data pipes, go into new geographies. That always costs more money to do. So there's inherent growth already within the business with the network that we have. Not saying that we're not looking at other geographies, but we really want to focus on having that density and essentiality in the markets that we serve.
This is Arizona, and this is where we started, as a business, back in 2018, and just giving you a view of, you know, what does this look like over time, and it's not a flip of the switch in terms of either growth or in terms of performance. It takes time to set these processes up and to get the outcomes and get the docs buy-in, for that matter. You can see from a membership perspective, number of providers and number of health plans, those all had very similar growth patterns. Same thing with revenue, that grew commensurate with what you see in volume.
And when you think about Medical Margin, what you see in the year where you went down is you had a lot of growth all at once, and some of that population wasn't managed well when the business took that on, and that had a negative impact. But over time, with even large numbers of patients, you start seeing a return of those positive margins. Some of this has to do with the cycle time that it takes in value-based Care of when you do the service to when you get paid. And unfortunately, there can be a 12- to 18-month window of time between when you do the service to when you get paid in value-based Care because you have to reconcile and get settlements from the health plan. So there's this delay inherent in what you do.
So, as a prime example, some of the new things that we've done over the last five months since I've arrived, that won't actually bear fruit until the second half of next year and into 2026 just because of that cycle time of how long it takes the reconciliations to happen with the health plans. That doesn't mean you don't do the activities. It just means you have to set the right expectation for how long it takes to actually see the return on investment. So when we think about near-term initiatives and the things that we're doing to try to drive medical margins, and kind of my task is, you know, I started with the board. It was very clear that we wanted to get to a place where we were cash flow positive, EBITDA positive as a business.
And so the things that we're focused on, as a business, are number one around quality. So you think about Star Ratings, and you also think about things like accurate coding and documentation. And the reason that's important is because those codes, number one, they help fund the care that the sick patients need. If you don't code it, they don't have it, and then you don't get funded for it. And so if you have a really sick patient that doesn't get accurate coding and documentation, you're underfunded. And we know there's opportunities in the business based on the way that we look at matched cohorts in other parts of the country, as well as previous business experience in other geographies, that I would say we're at least 20% underfunded from where we need to be. Also think about network rationalization.
So we have some of our clinicians who have been in for a while, and maybe they're just not ready yet for value-based care, or maybe they have too small of a panel and they haven't been able to grow. And so we have to do some rationalization of business that actually isn't making money, and we need to get back to a place where we're working with folks who want to do it and that are making money. And I would say the same thing on the payer side. We have some payers that have struggled in data sharing. They've struggled on their own growth. You know, the industry, if you look at Humana and, you know, Elevance and others, there's been a lot of volatility in the market, especially on the Medicare side.
And when you think about what they did to grab membership over the past three, four years, it's a really elevated benefit design. So that's one way to attract patients is you offer really rich benefits. You have a lot of giveaways. You have flex cards. You have really good pharmacy benefits. All those things increase your cost. And so it's not a surprise that we're seeing elevated costs, but now it's time to rationalize benefits. So some of the tailwinds heading into 2025 is you're going to see some reset of what's happening on benefit design. We don't have all the numbers for all the plans that we work with, but it's very encouraging as an industry that people are trying to pull those back.
That may temper growth just a little bit on the MA space, but again, there's no shortage of patients out there who need these services. And then when I think about how we grow, I mentioned before about getting denser with the clinicians in the markets where we are, and we have to do a different kind of underwriting than we've done before. And so that's in place now as well. And then there's still operational efficiencies as I look at the business, where I think we have the opportunity to shift things from centralizing what we're doing at a corporate level out to the field where the magic happens and have more boots on the ground out in the field and use our resources in a different way than we've done historically. I do think that we're well positioned.
What I would say when I look at the business, and part of my excitement for coming here five months ago, is I think it's really undervalued. With the existing population that we have today, I think we have about $200 million of embedded EBITDA in the business once we get the operational processes and tools in place to make that go. The timeline for that to show up, it does take time. It's not going to happen a flip of the switch. That's, you know, an 18-month time horizon before we get to that place. But it is there, and I do have the team around me that's capable of doing it, and we'll talk about the team in just a minute. Leif Pedersen just recently joined us about 45 days ago as our Chief Financial Officer.
Leif and I worked together, the first time about 10 years ago, when he was with DaVita Medical Group, and I was in DaVita Medical Group. And so I know that he has the background in value-based care that this business needs to be able to move the business in a different way than where it's been. Of course, Dr. Bacchus, who's one of the co-founders, expert in value-based care. Bill Bettermann, who's the COO of P3, was my COO in the Pacific Northwest, both with Optum as well as DaVita Medical Group, where we did a very similar thing in moving a market from fee-for-service to value at scale and went from unprofitable to profitable in a couple of years. Todd Lefkowitz is our expert in contracting.
And then we have, you know, great support from Cassie and Sarah Bussmann on both marketing as well as on quality. Finally, just showing, you know, on revenue growth, what's happened in the business. You know, it's not about revenue growth now. I think that was their charge when they first did the SPAC, back in 2021. It was a different environment, different market. But at the end of the day, the business was successful in doing that. And they were also able to generate additional medical margin in so doing. My task is to make this business cash flow positive and EBITDA positive. And those are the things, the levers that we're going to pull over the course of the next, you know, six months to add on to what we've done in the last five, to put us in a good position on a go-forward basis.
So when I look at the health of our business, I see a lot of good stuff, even though if you go back and, you know, read the transcripts and read the 10-Qs and everything else, you may have some questions like I first did. But knowing the business like I do and looking at what the potential is, I'm very bullish on what our company is going to be able to accomplish, in the months and years ahead. And I will pause there to see if there are any questions. Okay. Hearing none. Thank you all for your.