This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it could mean lost jobs and struggling organizations if leaders aren’t proactive about assessing their current assets and how they may or may not serve the organization in the future.
When I was chatting with Kaufman, he explained he’d recently met with a health system CEO who questioned the viability of his system’s assets in a future of population health management. “‘We built this very complicated system,'” said Kaufman as he recounted the conversation. “But I’m not sure this structure that I built from a geography and an asset perspective is the structure that supports population health.”
That sort of sophisticated assessment will be critical for adjusting an organization toward risk-based, population health management.
Drawing upon the ‘foot on the dock and one in the boat’ metaphor used to describe the transition to value-based care, Kaufman said, “Right now people have the boat that they have, and maybe the boat that you have isn’t the boat you’re going to sail away in.”
Yet, trading in your fleet for a new, smaller fleet is incredibly difficult for leaders.
“We’re not quite at that tipping point yet, but we’re closing in, maybe a year away, maybe two years away,” said Kauffman. “If reimbursement continues to get tougher and tougher, people will have to make decisions that at the moment they’d really like to not make.
These decisions may include closing acute-care facilities, consolidating with other systems or consolidating services within a system.
Kaufman summed up the situation many leaders are facing with another metaphor: “It’s sort of like somebody who built a baseball stadium but then bought a football team, but it never occurred to the guy who bought the football team that he couldn’t play football in the baseball stadium.”
If we play population health management right, we won’t need the hundred million dollar ‘supersize’ acute-care facilities we so pride ourselves on today.
How we react will determine our future success.
When was the last time McDonald’s asked you to supersize your meal?
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