No matter what reimbursement or delivery model healthcare organizations decide on, success in the healthcare reform era requires three core components – the right physician leaders, the right executives and the right technology infrastructure.
That advice was offered by R. Bruce Wellman, MD, chief executive officer of the Carle Physician Group, during a session at the Healthcare Financial Management Association's 2011 ANI: The Healthcare Finance Conference Monday in Orlando, Fla.
A little more than a year ago, central Illinois’ Carle Clinic Associates and its subsidiary, Health Alliance Medical Plans, and the Carle Foundation formed one legal entity. The organizations felt compelled to integrate due to market, regulatory and financial pressures, and the process had many fits and starts. Earlier attempts at integration, in fact, had failed.
What made the difference this time around, said Wellman, was the trust he had developed with the foundation’s CEO. In addition, he said, the management teams of each organization worked together, and they agreed to a governance structure that included physicians as leaders.
[See also: PwC says doctors, hospitals must work together.]
That governance structure, he said, became priority number one.
“It was important to have physician leaders throughout the enterprise,” Wellman said. A structure was created, he said, in which physicians are paired with executives to lead each area. “It creates accountability and it is a model that gives physicians an equal share of authority and responsibility,” he said.
The biggest hurdles to achieving a successful physician-led organization, said Dorrie Guest, Wellman’s co-presenter and a specialist leader at Deloitte Consulting who worked with Carle, are a lack of trained physician leaders and a lack of investment in training physician leaders.
“Most organizations haven’t put a line in the budget to invest in physician leadership,” Guest said. That investment should be there, she said, because training physicians to be good leaders is critical, both administratively and clinically.
Carle’s physician-led integrated delivery system is still in the newborn stages, Wellman said, but the organization is encouraged by the early results: It has been able to reduce costs enough to keep up with declining revenue.