Integration & Physician Issues

The following six stories about health system and retail health clinic affiliations occurred within the past year, and are just a few of the many relationships that were formalized between these two parties.

Cape Regional Physicians Associates, a multispecialty medial group affiliated with Cape Regional Health System in Cape May Court House, N.J., will join Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield's Patient Centered Medical Home Program Jan. 1.

Through the new Statewide Residency Program, hospitals in Florida that support residents are eligible to receive a piece of an $80 million appropriation as a supplemental payment for graduate medical education, according to the Florida governor's website.

Here are the 20 states that have the most and the least primary care physicians, including the fields of internal medicine, family medicine and general practice, obstetrics and gynecology and pediatrics.

While hospital acquisition of medical groups continues to grow, the rate at which hospitals and independent delivery systems are acquiring medical groups has slowed over the past few years, according to reports from Deloitte and Jackson Healthcare.

There are reasons to be skeptical of the widespread predictions of a physician shortage, according to a New York Times op-ed authored by Scott Gottlieb, MD, and Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD.

Last year, the United States had 260,221 total actively practicing female physicians — representing 31.9 percent of all active physicians in the nation, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges' 2013 State Physician Workforce Data Book.

Physician executives and integration experts share three aspects of physician integration that hospital CEOs and other executives tend not to understand.

The Greendale (Wis.) Medical Clinic, a physician practice with two internal medicine physicians, joined Milwaukee, Wis.-based Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin's clinical practice group Dec. 1.

Smaller areas of the U.S. — cities with less than 50,000 people — are experiencing a shortage of rheumatologists, according to a study published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, the journal of the American College of Rheumatology.