With rising costs, workforce shortages, and shifting patient demands, hospitals can’t afford to treat physician groups as just another vendor, focused only on staffing and contract terms. While coverage is essential, it’s not enough to solve the systemic challenges executives face every day.
To drive real improvements in patient care, throughput, and financial performance, hospitals need strategic partners who are fully aligned with clinical quality, operational success, and long-term sustainability.
The Problem: A Transactional Approach Falls Short
Hospitals that view physician groups purely through a transactional lens often face predictable challenges:
- Misaligned incentives – Clinicians may not be held accountable for hospital priorities like reducing length of stay (LOS), improving throughput, or strengthening patient experience.
- High turnover – When clinicians feel disconnected from the hospital’s mission, they are more likely to leave, disrupting care and driving up recruitment costs.
- Operational inefficiencies – Staffing models focused only on filling shifts fail to support broader hospital goals, leaving capacity and revenue on the table.
This model delivers coverage but not transformation. For executives working to balance quality, finances, and workforce stability, that is no longer acceptable.
The Solution: Strategic Partnerships with Physician Groups
Hospitals that build collaborative, data-driven partnerships with their physician groups achieve far stronger results. The most effective partnerships are grounded in three principles:
- Aligning incentives – Ensuring clinicians are invested in shared goals around efficiency, quality, and outcomes. When physicians are measured and rewarded on the same metrics that matter to hospital leaders, the entire system moves forward together.
- Embedding physician leadership – Involving frontline clinicians in hospital decision-making creates shared accountability. Physician leaders can serve as champions for initiatives such as patient flow, discharge planning, or patient experience, ensuring operational strategies translate into bedside practice.
- Using data as a driver – Transparent, real-time analytics create accountability and allow hospitals and physician groups to identify bottlenecks, measure progress, and sustain improvements.
The Impact: Proof in the Results
Hospitals that shift from transactional contracts to strategic partnerships see measurable improvements:
- Reduced length of stay – 15–25% shorter LOS, creating more bed availability, recovering lost capacity, and lowering costs.
- Improved patient satisfaction – Demonstrably higher scores for both the clinician and hospital, strengthening, strengthening both reimbursement and community reputation.
- Lower clinician turnover – Greater engagement and stability, reducing recruiting and onboarding costs while preserving continuity of care.
At Core, we have seen these results firsthand. In one Hospital Medicine partnership, aligning incentives and embedding physician leadership reduced average LOS by more than a full day, recovering hundreds of bed-days and creating millions in annualized value. In another Emergency Medicine transformation, data-driven collaboration cut the left without being seen (LWBS) rate by more than half, increased encounters, and generated millions in incremental revenue. These outcomes didn’t happen because of a contract; they happened because of a true partnership.
The Path Forward
As healthcare continues to evolve, hospitals cannot afford to view their physician groups as vendors. Coverage is the baseline. Transformation comes when groups and hospitals move beyond transactions to form partnerships built on alignment, accountability, and trust.
By embracing this model, hospitals can strengthen clinical engagement, improve operational efficiency, and build the foundation for long-term success. The proof is in the results: when hospitals and physician groups row in the same direction, everyone (patients, clinicians, and hospital leaders) wins.
