Hospital-physician relationships: imperative for clinical enterprise collaboration

The need for new venues for physician-hospital collaboration is significant and growing, especially between independent physicians and health systems. Often physicians and hospitals act independently of each other, even though maintaining and sustaining a productive relationship between physicians and hospitals is essential to good patient care and improving the health status of the communities we serve. The tension in physician-hospital relationships is a long-standing and widely acknowledged concern. The old model of hospital-physician relationships, governed by the rules of the organized medical staff structure, doesn't work in the current environment, which has grown increasingly complex as a result of economic, legal, and care-delivery changes. These complexities make relationship management challenging. Hospitals and physicians struggle to align behaviors to achieve cost and quality goals. The need has never been greater for hospitals and physicians to work together as a joint clinical enterprise to improve quality, reduce practice variation, and control the cost of healthcare. This article explores the challenges and some options for improving the physician-hospital relationship in the current environment.     

Alternative models of hospital-physician affiliation as the United States moves away from tight managed care

Using concepts from organizational economics and sociology, this article compares the medical staff, hospital-owned physician practice, and hybrid models of hospital-physician coordination, as well as the pressures for affiliation during the premanaged care, tight managed care, and loose managed care eras. Case studies of two hospital systems in New York City and two in San Diego illustrate the concepts. Although pressures for tighter hospital-physician affiliation now are weaker than during the era of tight managed care, they are greater than they were before managed care. Hospitals are not reverting to exclusive use of the medical staff model of affiliation but rather are maintaining a mix of medical staff, owned physician practice, and hybrid models. Hospitals probably will continue to seek tighter affiliations with physicians to increase coordination, enhance negotiating leverage with health plans, and gain admissions.     

Turf battles rock radiology

CEOs tell Hospitals magazine that imaging is a major area of expansion for their hospitals. But radiology is in a state of transition. Technological advances have made it possible to do more radiological procedures in the physician's office. This situation has created competition--and tension--between physicians in the same community, physicians and hospitals, and physicians on the same medical staff. How can you avoid costly turf wars at your hospital? Health care executives and directors of medical affairs say that the answer to this realignment of specialties is to create integrated teams of medical specialists.     

Helping physicians cope with RBRVS

Hospital administrators have long recognized the importance of strong ties with medical staff. Implementation of the resource-based relative value scale (RBRVS) has disrupted the normal practice of physicians and has placed renewed stress upon the hospital-physician relationship. Hospital administrators can use their expertise to help physicians offset revenue losses incurred under this payment reform. Such an approach is logical and will benefit all parties involved, because it will enhance physician-facility relations and augment facility credibility. In this article, RBRVS is examined in terms of its impact on physicians, hospitals, and the relationship between the two. Financial management strategies are identified that can assist physicians to increase practice efficiency and cost containment to remedy potential revenue reductions caused by the implementation of RBRVS.     

Cultivating Physician Relations to Enhance Rural Hospital Utilization

Rural hospitals are searching for new strategies to enhance utilization in view of constraints introduced by prospective payment and other environmental pressures. Developing physician relations is an approach that is reportedly leading to better hospital-physician collaboration and subsequently to improved utilization. This paper examines rural hospital-physician relations and the association with utilization. The findings suggest that rural hospitals emphasize quality care as well as diagnostic and treatment equipment procurement as methods for building relationships with physicians. These strategies are correlated with efforts to build a larger medical staff. Higher rural hospital utilization, in terms of occupancy, discharges and patient days provided, is associated with a larger medical staff. The results suggest that rural hospitals' attempts to cultivate physician relations have the potential for making significant differences in utilization outcomes. However, the linkages between utilization and physician relations are complex and require further research.     

Implementing meaningful CME as an essential component in a community hospital quality assurance plan.

The pursuit of high-quality patient care within a community hospital highlights the tenuous relationship between the hospital board and administration on one side and the voluntary medical staff on the other. Craddick describes the need to monitor and improve patient management, the commitment of physicians and administrators to high quality care, and the unfortunate failure of most hospital programs to go beyond paper exercises designed to satisfy the Joint Commission of Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH). The American College of Surgeons summarizes current methods of monitoring the quality of patient care, and gives four examples of successful programs. The JCAH Manual sets standards for hospitals and medical staffs to achieve. However, thus far no one has described how a hospital's medical staff, board, and administration join forces to implement a comprehensive quality assurance program. This paper presents the experience of one community hospital in dealing with this problem over a two-year period.     

Hospitals' marketing challenge: influencing physician behavior

Physicians' referring and admitting behavior as well as their clinical management practices are major determinants of hospitals' profitability under prospective payment. Four techniques are available to hospitals that seek to increase market share: Recruitment and retention strategies. In planning the mix of specialties represented on staff, hospitals should consider the effects of a physician's practice on the hospital's case mix. Peer pressure. Peer review programs in hospitals as well as through medical or specialty societies may help persuade physicians to alter their use of services. Education and information programs. Hospitals can assist physicians in patient management by conducting economic grand rounds, developing committees to study and communicate cost data to physicians, and providing information on alternatives to hospitalization. Incentives. Putting physicians at risk by linking planned expenditures to hospital financial performance can influence practice patterns. Other techniques include offering limited partnerships to medical staff members and merging the hospital and medical staff into one corporation. Hospitals may also need to influence physicians away from ventures that compete directly with the institution, such as ambulatory surgery centers.     

Hospital-physicians relations: cooperation, competition, or separation?

Because many services performed in hospitals can safely and conveniently be performed in ambulatory settings, physicians have become owners of entities directly competing with hospitals for patients in a new medical arms race. Hospitals and medical staff physicians face growing tensions as a result of physicians' growing reluctance to take emergency department call and the consequences of hospitalists replacing physicians in the care of inpatients. Although there are increasing expectations that health system challenges will lead hospitals and physicians to collaborate, in many markets the willingness and ability for hospitals and physicians to work together is actually eroding.     

A conceptual framework for evaluating joint venture opportunities between hospitals and physicians.

This paper reviews the changes in the competitive and regulatory environment and examines the impact of those changes on the relationships between hospitals and physicians. Transaction cost economics (TCE) provides a conceptual framework for examining the emergence of closer linkages between hospitals and physicians than the traditional independent hospital and medical staff organisations. TCE predicts that as investments in support of transactions become more specialised, closer linkages are more efficient. To illustrate, two case studies of successful hospital-physician joint ventures are presented. The first case study describes a joint venture between hospitals and physicians to purchase durable medical equipment. The second case describes the breakdown of an informal arrangement and the subsequent formation of a joint venture to organise a clinical programme. The discussion reports the rationale for choosing these structural arrangements and their key features, pointing out how TCE would account for the decision to establish a joint venture. The conclusion discusses the implications of this argument for the strategic decisions of health care managers.     

Economic regulation and hospital behavior: the effects on medical staff organization and hospital-physician relationships.

New forms of payment, growing competition, the continued evolution of multiunit hospital systems, and associated forces are redefining the fundamental relationship between hospitals and physicians. As part of a larger theory of organizational response to the environment, the effects of these external forces on hospital-medical staff organization were examined using both cross-sectional data and data collected at two points in time. Findings suggest that regulation and competition, at least up to 1982, have had relatively little direct effect on hospital medical staff organization. Rather, changes in medical staff organization are more strongly associated with hospital case mix and with structural characteristics involving membership in a multiunit system, size, ownership, and location. The pervasive effect of case mix and the consistent effect of multiunit system involvement support the need for policymakers to give these factors particular attention in considering how hospitals and their medical staffs might respond to future regulatory and/or competitive approaches.     

充分发挥绍兴市社区卫生服务机构功能的几点构想

据调查,绍兴地区各个大中型医院＂看病难、看病贵＂问题较为突出,而且许多高层次专科医生在诊疗一些常见小病,既浪费医疗资源,也不利于高层专科人才的提高。这与目前社区卫生服务机构不完善,社区卫生服务队伍不健全,人员素质不高,双向转诊制度不落实,绝大部分患者涌向大中型医院有关。如要从根本上来解决这一问题,就必须大力发展社区卫生服务,培养以全科医师为骨干的社区卫生服务队伍,提高社区卫生服务能力,同时做好政府优惠政策的宣传工作及适宜技术的推广工作,完善双向转诊制度等措施,让社区来承担预防、保健、健康教育、计划生育、医疗和康复等六位一体的职能。逐步做到＂大病进医院,小病在社区＂,这样对于方便群众就医,减轻费用负担,建立和谐的医患关系,具有重要意义。     

南京市公立医院医务人员内外部工作动机对工作投入的影响研究

目的 分析公立医院医务人员的内外部工作动机对工作投入的影响机制及内外部动机之间的关系,为提高医务人员的工作投入提供借鉴。方法 利用工作动机量表和工作投入量表,采用分层抽样方法,选取南京市3家三级医院、4家二级医院和16家社区卫生服务中心的医务人员进行问卷调查。结果 结构方程模型显示,内部动机和外部动机对工作投入的各个维度的路径系数分别为0.42、0.35、0.33（P＜0.001）和0.21、0.23、0.29（P＜0.001）,内部动机和外部动机的交互项对工作投入的路径系数为- 0.13（P = 0.003）。说明医务人员内部动机、外部动机对工作投入各维度:工作活力、工作奉献和工作专注都有正向影响;外部动机与内部动机协同影响医务人员的工作投入。结论 医院应关注医生内部动机与外部动机间的差异以及工作动机对医生工作投入的影响的不同,有针对性地采用不同的激励手段,全面提升医务人员的职业素养。     

The effects of hospital-physician integration strategies on hospital financial performance.

STUDY QUESTION. This study investigated the longitudinal relations between hospital financial performance outcomes and three hospital-physician integration strategies: physician involvement in hospital governance, hospital ownership by physicians, and the integration of hospital-physician financial relationships. DATA SOURCES AND STUDY SETTING. Using secondary data from the State of California, integration strategies in approximately 300 California short-term acute care hospitals were tracked over a ten-year period (1981-1990). STUDY DESIGN. The study used an archival design. Hospital performance was measured on three dimensions: operational profitability, occupancy, and costs. Thirteen control variables were used in the analyses: market competition, affluence, and rurality; hospital ownership; teaching costs and intensity; multihospital system membership; hospital size; outpatient service mix; patient volume case mix; Medicare and Medicaid intensity; and managed care intensity. DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTION. Financial and utilization data were obtained from the State of California, which requires annual hospital reports. A series of longitudinal regressions tested the hypotheses. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS. Considerable variation was found in the popularity of the three strategies and their ability to predict hospital performance outcomes. Physician involvement in hospital governance increased modestly from 1981-1990, while ownership and financial integration declined significantly. Physician governance was associated with greater occupancy and higher operating margins, while financial integration was related to lower hospital operating costs. Direct physician ownership, particularly in small hospitals, was associated with lower operating margins and higher costs. Subsample analyses indicate that implementation of the Medicare prospective payment system in 1983 had a major impact on these relationships, especially on the benefits of financial integration. CONCLUSIONS. The findings support the validity of hospital-physician financial integration efforts, and to a lesser extent the involvement of physicians in hospital governance. The results lend considerably less support for strategies built around direct physician ownership in hospitals, particularly since PPS implementation. RELEVANCE/IMPACT. These findings challenge prior studies that found few financial benefits to hospital-physician integration prior to PPS implementation in 1983. The results imply that financial benefits of integration may take several years after implementation to emerge, are most salient in a managed care or managed competition environment, and vary by hospital size and multihospital system membership.     

Hospitals and medical staffs: the concept of planning takes on new meaning.

Broad trends in health care are redefining medical staff planning. Hospital CEOs are recognizing the critical need to involve their physicians in hospital strategic planning at many levels. Gone are the days when it was sufficient to invite medical staff members to annual planning retreats and add individual physicians to boards; hospitals that thrive in the 1990s will be those that have created strong strategic links with their physicians. At the same time, medical staff development planning is changing in important ways. Recent federal government alerts on fraud and abuse and inurement in physician-recruiting activities are leading hospitals to document community benefit in their recruitment efforts. And hospital executives now realize that changes in the physician market will require them to plan carefully in order to ensure a strong base of primary care and other much-needed physicians. These two trends present CEOs with multilayered challenges. Following are reports on what leading-edge hospitals are doing in both areas.     

Regulatory intensity, hospital size and the formalization of medical staff organization in hospitals.

Using a theory of organizational response to regulation, this study examined the effects of regulatory intensity and hospital size on the formalization of medical staff organization in Canadian hospitals. The general hypothesis was that, in provinces with greater regulatory intensity, hospitals would exhibit greater formalization of medical staff, and greater involvement of physicians in hospital governance and management; larger hospitals would have greater formalization of medical staff than smaller hospitals. Data from 574 hospitals indicated that both hospital size and provincial regulatory intensity were important factors predictive of the overall formalization of medical staff organization. Depending upon the provincial location, hospitals have developed different patterns of formalizing their medical staff structures.     

The WAMI Rural Hospital Project. Part 3: Building health care leadership in rural communities.

The WAMI Rural Hospital Project (RHP) intervention combined aspects of community development, strategic planning and organizational development to address the leadership issues in six Northwest rural hospitals. Hospitals and physicians, other community health care providers and local townspeople were involved in this intervention, which was accomplished in three phases. In the first phase, extensive information about organizational effectiveness was collected at each site. Phase two consisted of 30 hours of education for the physician, board, and hospital administrator community representatives covering management, hospital board governance, and scope of service planning. In the third phase, each community worked with a facilitator to complete a strategic plan and to resolve conflicts addressed in the management analyses. The results of the evaluation demonstrated that the greatest change noted among RHP hospitals was improvement in the effectiveness of their governing boards. All boards adopted some or all of the project's model governance plan and had successfully completed considerable portions of their strategic plans by 1989. Teamwork among the management triad (hospital, board, and medical staff) was also substantially improved. Other improvements included the development of marketing plans for the three hospitals that did not initially have them and more effective use of outside consultants. The project had less impact on improving the functioning of the medical chief of staff, although this was not a primary target of the intervention. There was also relatively less community interest in joining regional health care associations. The authors conclude that an intervention program tailored to address specific community needs and clearly identified leadership deficiencies can have a positive effect on rural health care systems.     

Communicating with physicians: one hospital's approach

Experience with the PAL program has demonstrated that it takes approximately six months to one year for a PAL relationship to build trust and open communication. By the end of the sixth month, the relationship is usually established to the point that the physician and office staff voluntarily call on the PAL manager with concerns requiring attention. Riverside continues to explore ways to build and strengthen the PAL Program. At a recent hospital managerial conference, managers and physicians discussed the hospital-physician relationship and collaborated on ways to improve communications and alliances with the medical staff. In addition, hospital-sponsored social events that provide opportunities for physicians and PAL managers to interact outside the workplace have been introduced and well received. As the health care delivery system undergoes transformation and implementation of the computerized patient record becomes a reality, the PAL Program will serve as a foundation in the establishment of new programs and relationships between the hospital and the medical staff that will ensure Riverside's future success in the marketplace.     

Recruitment of Physicians To Rural America: A View Through the Lens of Transaction Cost Theory

CONTEXT: Many rural hospitals in the United States continue to have difficulties recruiting physicians. While several studies have examined some of the factors affecting the nature of this problem, we know far less about the role of economic incentives between rural providers and physicians. PURPOSE: This conceptual article describes an economic theory of organization called Transaction Cost Theory (TCT) and applies it to rural hospital-physician relationships to highlight how transaction costs affect the type of contractual arrangement used by rural hospitals when recruiting physicians. METHODS: The literature is reviewed to introduce TCT, describe current trends in hospital contracting with physicians, and develop a TCT contracting model for analysis of rural hospital-physician recruitment. FINDINGS: The TCT model predicts that hospitals tend to favor contractual arrangements in which physicians are full-time employees if investments in physical or other assets made by hospitals cannot be easily redeployed for other services in the health care system. Transaction costs related to motivation and coordination of physician services are the key factors in understanding the unique contractual difficulties faced by rural providers. CONCLUSIONS: The TCT model can be used by rural hospital administrators to assess economic incentives for physician recruitment.     

Medical community involvement in a breast cancer screening promotional project.

The analysis, mobilization, and involvement of medical communities in two counties targeted for intervention by the Washington State Community Breast Cancer Screening Project is described. Principles of community organization were applied to the health care sectors in the counties, and the PRECEDE-PROCEED model was used as a conceptual framework for considering individual physician behavior. Quantitative and qualitative medical community assessment methods included a demographic study, a survey of primary care physicians, personal interviews with physicians, and medical office staff focus groups. In both intervention areas, physician planning groups selected, developed, and helped implement intervention activities targeting the health care sectors. These activities included informational mailings to physicians, training of medical office staff members and clinical mammographers, and support for a reminder system. The experience demonstrated that physicians practicing in medium-sized cities are willing to be active in community disease prevention programs.     

Salaried physicians' intent to retain hospital membership: the effects of position and work attitudes

This study examined the anticipation of salaried hospital physicians in Israel to retain hospital membership for a long term until their retirement. Examined are attitudinal and position factors, as well as hospital standing personal and situational factors that relate to this anticipation. The data collected from 195 full-time salaried physicians in Israeli hospitals indicated that about one-third of the physicians anticipate to retain hospital membership until retirement. It was found that factors reflecting the physician's standing within the hospital were the main predictors of this anticipation, whereas work-related attitudes had little or no effect on it. The implications of these finding to hospital-physician integration strategies in the United States are discussed.