Hospitals purchasing physician practices may find that the relationship doesn’t turn into the fairy tale romance they had envisioned. A webinar presented yesterday by healthcare compensation and human resource consulting firm Integrated Healthcare Strategies offered tips on how hospitals can revive souring relationships.
[See also: Hiring doctors is not enough to improve quality and costs.]
The signs of a disintegrating relationship include:
• Lack of clarity and agreement on strategic goals
• Medical staff opposition to hospital-employed physicians
• Low productivity related to compensation plan design
• Different values and culture among owned practices and with the hospital
• Lack of agreement on how to measure financial performance
• Historically profitable practices become losers overnight
• High operating costs among employed physicians and owned practices
• Practice revenues below expectation
“Perhaps the most important step of turning a losing practice into a winning practice is making sure that there is a clear strategy and that there is … strategic alignment amongst all the key players: board, management team, physician leadership and physicians in the owned practices, as well as your voluntary positions, who are not in their own practices,” said co-presenter William Jessee, MD, senior vice president and senior advisor at Integrated Healthcare Strategies. “Everybody needs to understand where you’re trying to go and why you’re getting into the physician practice business – what the objective is.”
[See also: Physician employment by hospitals expected to accelerate.]
It’s also important to remember that fixing the relationship isn’t going to happen overnight, said co-presenter Bruce Johnson, JD, a partner at law firm Polsinelli Shughart. “It’s not going to be come in, pound on the table and have the solution occurring immediately overnight,” he said. “It’s like with anything. It takes a while to get into a bad situation, oftentimes, and it’s likely going to take some process to work through it.”
The process of working through it should include identifying what the problem is or problems are, developing a game plan, having a vision and putting in place a compensation structure and an institutional culture that promotes improvement and alignment.
“If you can do all those things you can turn an underperforming physician enterprise as part of an integrated system into a well performing physician enterprise that supports the strategic goals and objectives of the organization,” said Jessee.
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.