Hospital/physician relations

Hospitals and health systems will face ever more pressure in 2014 to establish the core skills needed to thrive in a rapidly changing healthcare market.

The December issue of Healthcare Finance News highlights the biggest stories our staff covered across the previous 12 months. And as has been the case for much of the past decade, many of the top issues deal with the tremendous changes impacting the healthcare industry.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the HHS Inspector General finalized the Stark law exemption on Friday, which allows hospitals to fund up to 85 percent of EHR costs for physicians.

All the talk about moving healthcare reimbursement from volume to value sounds great, in theory. But how this shift takes place in practice is more complex than simply ending one form of payment and starting a new one.

Most integrated delivery networks today have hospitalists managing some portion of the hospital's inpatient activity. But the most common contract arrangements can often have a number of shortcomings.

Consumers are not alone in finding retail clinics an attractive option. Increasingly, hospitals are adding them to their array of services.

To be successful, a hospital must acquire physician practices able to work in a world that is essentially foreign to what they are used to. The 'new normal' is based on value, outcomes and patient satisfaction.

Merger and acquisition activity within the healthcare sector was up in the third quarter of 2013, according to a report from M&A data publisher Irving Levin Associates.

In a previous post, we discussed five mistakes commonly made by healthcare organizations when acquiring physician practices. Here we add another five challenges and missteps associated with acquisitions and alignments.

Physician practice acquisitions have occurred at a rapid pace for nearly four years. We've identified a few recurring challenges and missteps associated with these transactions that potential acquirers should know in advance.