Hospitals need to help Medicare HMOs

Many of the health maintenance organizations that rushed to create Medicare products are bailing out of their Medicare contracts. Donald E.L. Johnson writes that Medicare HMOs face market and government challenges, and hospitals should try to anticipate HMOs' next moves and have responses ready.     

Hospitals, physicians need to be allies, not adversaries

The only way to bring hospital costs under control without sacrificing quality is to end the adversarial relationship between administration and physician staff, says Philip Hoggard. It's time to integrate the two camps into a shared organizational model that allocates risks and rewards fairly.     

Hospitals and communities don't need more physicians than HMOs currently require

In an article in the March 1995 Health Care Strategic Management, titled "Physician resource planning must keep pace with evolving markets," health care consultants Richard J. Lohkamp, Ph.D., and H.J. Simmons III presented a set of physician need rates for the more than 30 medical specialties that constitute the typical medical staff for a general community hospital. Since publishing that article, the consulting firm of Longshore+Simmons has used those need rates to help hospitals in several states develop physician resource plans. That experience and subsequent research have led Lohkamp to update his findings and conclusions, and he shares them here.