Roundtable: Hospital/Physician Collaboration: Better Patient Care Through Aligned Incentives and Improved Systemness

February 21-22, 2008, Irving, TX

Co-Sponsored by:
American Hospital Association, Health Research and Educational Trust, the Council of Accountable Physician Practices, and the Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy

Meeting Overview:
Many healthcare leaders agree that fundamental delivery system reform is needed. Hospitals and physicians account collectively for half total health care spending in the U.S. Further, recent research indicates that a large majority of physicians admit a large majority of their patients to a single hospital. This work suggests that, together, hospitals and physician groups could serve as the center-point of an accountable delivery system, one that features aligned incentives for all providers to improve clinical integration, coordination, and ultimately, patient care. However, financial and other incentives for physicians and hospitals are rarely aligned. How can such alignment be achieved? What have we learned from previous collaborations between physician groups and hospitals? This roundtable brought together experts working in this area to discuss the lessons learned from successful physician/hospital collaborations designed to improve patient care.

Goals:

• To understand the lessons learned from successful physician/hospital collaborations designed to improve clinical integration and systemness overall;
• To understand the key barriers that currently prevent physician groups and hospitals from working more collaboratively to coordinate care; and,
• To identify ways that financial and non-financial incentives could be better aligned to support systemness and collaboration between physicians and hospitals.
  
  

Materials:

Participant List

Agenda

Hospital-Physician Collaboration: Landscape of Economic Integration and Impact on Clinical Integration
Paper Commissioned by KPIHP; written by Lawton Robert Burns and Ralph W. Muller, University of Pennsylvania