As hospitals and health systems build their employed medical practices, a large emphasis is often put on compensation arrangements, and little attention is paid to engaging physicians in the successful management of these practices. At the same time, hospitals are experiencing significant operating losses for their employed practices. Losses vary, but hospital-owned practices typically lose […]
Twelve years after launching the retail health insurgency with the purchase of the start-up MinuteClinic, CVS Health is upping the ante. In the biggest deal of 2017, CVS Health acquired Aetna in December. At this point, all predictions about how this merger will impact hospitals and health systems are conjecture. However, hospital leaders would be […]
Advanced practice clinicians are sometimes casually thought of as a cheaper alternative to physicians by healthcare administrators. In actuality, there are many compelling reasons to bring these clinicians into a practice; economics is not the whole picture. Many high-performing practices have found that advanced practice clinicians (APCs), including nurse practitioners (NPs), physician assistants (PAs), and […]
If your organization is like most health systems and hospitals, your physician recruitment plan may be based on a less than complete picture of your existing physician base. Many medical staff recruitment plans do not consider the extent to which the organization’s physicians and their patients are making use of the organizations inpatient and ambulatory […]
A strategic plan provides a roadmap for where a hospital or health system will focus its efforts and resources. The plan must generate financial results required for long term success. Therefore, financial implications should be integrated throughout the planning process to focus on the initiatives that will have the most profound positive impact on the […]
Hospitals and health systems have not historically focused on post-acute care. However, several factors are now motivating them to develop or strengthen their ties with post-acute care providers and establish an explicit post-acute care strategy. Acute care providers need to develop strong collaborative relationships with post-acute providers to ensure access to the post-acute care capacity […]
Increasingly, hospital administrators are concluding that there is a great deal more to managing their employed physicians than simply signing them up. Hospital and health system leadership use data and analysis to create medical staff plans that determine the physician complement that best meets their various needs. Traditionally, hospitals and health systems have used two […]
Despite the attention being given to potential repeal of the Accountable Care Act, we can be reasonably certain that some aspects of health care reform are unlikely to be overhauled anytime soon—or possibly, at all. Among these is the shift to and emphasis on value-based payment, with its focus on providing high quality care in […]
CMS wants more physicians to participate in ACOs and other alternative payment models (APMs). It’s best if they are risk-taking ACOs, but any ACO seems to be better than none. At least, that is what the incentives in MACRA seem to indicate. Prior to the passage of MACRA (the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act […]
Proactive collaboration allows AMCs and community counterparts to benefit from each other’s strengths, creating value that wasn’t necessarily sought or derived from more traditional partnering approaches. In Part I of this blog post on partnerships between community hospitals/systems and academic/major teaching centers (“AMCs”) we: Explored changes in AMC rationale for pursuing partnerships and partner attributes […]