Hospitals are increasingly looking to more closely align with physicians for a variety of reasons, including the likely evolution of the healthcare industry from a fee-for-service to a global payment model. Establishing accountable care organizations are one way hospitals and…
Integration & Physician Issues
As the federal government prepares to launch accountable care organizations in Jan. 2012, private payors are already setting up limited ACO pilots in preparation for launching their own ACOs.These preparations are causing some anxiety in the provider community, says Richard…
In February, The Nebraska Medical Center and Methodist Health System, both based in Omaha, announced they would come together, along with their physicians, to create an accountable care organization to better coordinate care, improve quality and reduce costs to patients.
Historically, hospital administrators and physicians have had adversarial relations with each other, but greater demands on both groups to align with each other will require hospital administrators to pay more attention to improving physician relations, says Nick A. Fabrizio, a…
Proposed federal rules on accountable care organizations are expected in December and Donald Berwick, MD, the new CMS administrator, is personally involved in the process, according to a CMS spokesman.
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When group practices join a hospital or system, some of them prefer a quasi-independent status, says Ronald Bremer, president of Formation Strategies, a Kansas City, Mo.-based company that specializes in healthcare transactions, including hospitals buying up physician practices.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic, a 900-physician group practice in New Hampshire, has earned $13 million so far in the Medicare Physician Group Practice Demonstration, the model for accountable care organizations.Those earnings, which don’t include the last year of the five-year project, were…
Every morning, administrators and department heads at St. Joseph Hospital in Kokomo, Ind., gather to discuss recent patient safety issues, possible problems that could occur in the next 24 hours and any staff complaints. By meeting in a "daily huddle"…
The New Paradigm of PartnershipHistorically, the relationship between hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers could be characterized in many cases as adversarial. Hospitals often perceived ASCs as a potential threat to their profitable outpatient surgery business, which in turn would hinder…
St. Joseph's Hospital in Elmira, N.Y., will acquire the assets of Internal Medicine Associates of the Southern Tier, according to a report by WETM News.