Hospital Physician Relationships - Thoughts That Go Bump in the Night and Suddenly Awaken Hospital CEOs

From Sailing the Seven “Cs” of Hospital-Physician Relationships: Competence, Convenience, Clarity, Continuity, Competition, Control, Cash (Practice Support Resources, A Practice Support Resource Publication, www.practicesupport.com)

1. Medical staff will revolt and cause firing of hospital CEO.

2. Hospital quality ratings will be published in local newspaper and will place hospital at bottom of list.

3. Hospital will experience an uncontrollable epidemic of drug resistant staphylococcus infections.

4. Orthopedic surgeons and cardiovascular specialists will withdraw from medical staff and build their own specialty hospitals.

5. Dickie Scruggs, Mississippi lawyer, will bring successful class action suite against not-for-profit hospitals, converting them into taxable entities.

6. Medicare pay-for-performance movement will catch fire, forcing hospital to invest heavily into IT system.

7. Hospital loses multibillion dollar malpractice lawsuit.

8. Debt burdens from paying for uninsured grow, and hospital is forced to pursue program and merger with main rival.

9. Demand for transparency and for quality based purchasing and quality reporting to support evidence-based medicine and improved coordination of care overwhelms hospital IT department.

10. Pressures on margins force hospital to tighten integration with physicians – to employ more specialists, to strike partnerships with competing physicians, to fund EMR technologies for physicians, and to jointly negotiate prices for costly supply chain technology items.

11. Regional Health Information Organizations are for real, and the government will force hospitals to share tightly held , secret information with competitors.

12. As consumer-driven movement gains traction, hospital will force greater price transparency, patient-friendly billing, public reporting of pricing in advance, bundled billing with physicians, more collection and billing from individual patients, longer payment cycles, and more competition from lower-cost providers.

13. Political events in Washington, D.C., and state capitols will impose heavy taxes and more regulations upon hospitals.

14. Forces of decentralization will compel hospitals to abandon central facilities, to outsource many services, and to cede partial control of management and finances to providers at peripheral sites.