Physician employment is back—and this time, it may be here to stay, says Nick Fabrizio, PhD, a principal with the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Health Care Consulting Group. "I see the employment trend continuing," he says. "Not only because of declining reimbursement, but because of increases in operating expenses every year. Add in

Nine-hospital health system HCA North Texas, based in Irving, is like most health care organizations in the United States: faced with a challenging financial environment, it needs to find innovative ways to do more with less. Explains Michael Hayes, director of asset management for the health system, "We have to streamline processes that

Challenges to the traditional structure of physician economics were already creating a trend toward increased hospital-physician alignment when health care reform added a strong incentive in the form of support for accountable care organizations (ACOs).1 Greg Scrine, managing principal in GE Healthcare's Performance Solutions Integrated Healthcare

When the team at Virtua, a non-profit health care system headquartered in Marlton, NJ, began planning its new Voorhees hospital location in 2002, it was agreed that the design of the new facility would be governed by patient care. “The goal we had in mind was to spend our money around the patient,” says Virtua CEO Richard Miller. “When we visited

Like their counterparts in other states, hospitals in Rhode Island have experienced their share of tragic outcomes based on medical errors, from mix-ups in medication administration to wrong-site surgeries. However, change is afoot in the state as data pertaining to events are more freely reported by hospital staff, aggregated, and shared by the

Improving the patient experience has long been a goal of health care providers. However, health care reform is making the patient experience more than just a marketing consideration: the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) have structured value-based purchasing to link 1% of Medicare reimbursement to a hospital’s performance in quality

Patrick Dyson, executive vice president of strategy and corporative services for Borgess Health (Kalamazoo, Michigan), traces his organization’s “pay for quality” physician alignment strategy back to the Institute of Medicine’s November 1999 report “To Err Is Human.” Following the publication of the report, which shocked many with its statistics on