How medical groups can use surveys as tools in negotiations with hospitals.
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May 16
St. Bully Medical Center – Videocast
We’re not talking Teddy Roosevelt, we’re talking intimidation.
May 15
Are Some Partners Less Equal But Just As Liable?
Many medical groups operate as partnerships, generally partnerships of professional corporations. The reason for that structure is simple: it allows maximum flexibility in terms of each owner’s management of his or her related business and tax attributes, while preserving a high degree of protection from liability.
Note that I said “a high degree” because there is never a situation in which there can be total protection from liability.
At the same time, many groups have compensation plans that reward different partners, or different classes of partners, differently, such that there is a spread, sometimes a wide spread, in compensation.
One complication of this type structure is that while all partners are jointly and severally liable for the debts of the partnership, some partners are reaping a much greater financial reward. And, in some instances, that reward is not tied to the fact that they are devoting more time, or harder effort, or even smarter effort to the venture.
In some cases, this situation is intended and understood by all. But in others, it is a situation arrived at blindly.
When did you last look at your partnership agreement? Does it create the liability result that was intended?
Comment or contact me if you’d like to discuss this post.
Mark F. Weiss
May 14
Yin and Yang. Contract Term and Termination – Videocast
Your contract’s real term is how quickly it can be terminated.
May 13
How Medical Groups Get Mired Fighting The Last War
It’s often said that countries’ militaries are mired in fighting the last war.
For example, navies build more large ships to combat the memory of the last war’s naval battles, which are also the battles projected to come. But the future is not always a repeat of the past and the next threat, perhaps attack by a swarm of small ships, may leave large ships at a decided disadvantage.
So, too, many physician groups are fighting the last war, imagining that the threat to their existence is from, say, the hospital, or from a certain type of other specialists.
But the reality may be very different.
Many of the scenarios that medical groups consider in setting their strategy, if they engage in strategy work at all, and if they consider alternative scenarios at all, are mired in the past: Past battles that were either won or lost, but past all the same.
The pace of change in healthcare is accelerating dramatically. At the same time that the federal government is poised to grab more control through the implementation of Obamacare, so too will some states begin to implement other “reform.”
And, at the same time, disruptive providers, hospitals, large employers, new technologies, and entrepreneurial thinkers will change the landscape on which your group’s competitiveness will be measured.
It’s no longer business as usual. It is business as unusual. And that requires a new way of thinking.
Comment or contact me if you’d like to discuss this post.
Mark F. Weiss
May 10
L’air du Temps – Podcast
Medical groups must understand the direction of the societal wind. You might like it. You might hate it. Either way, it’s still windy.
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May 08
100% Air Conditioned
The old hotel stood on a corner 10 or 15 blocks from the new center of downtown, run-down curtains visible through the windows of its 10 story dirty brick hulk. But it was the red neon sign, with letters at least 5 feet high stretched all the way across the building just beneath the roof line that caught my attention: “100% Air Conditioned.”
At the time the building was built, my guess is the 1930′s, a completely air-conditioned hotel was an incredible competitive advantage. I imagine that guests flocked to it, ready to plunk down cash – this was way before credit cards – to do business with the hotel. But today, air conditioning is not even a question on the minds of potential guests.
It’s not much different when it comes to the question of a medical group’s competitive advantage in attracting contracting partners. Do you have one?
Competitive advantages are developed, excluding competitors from the equation. But as soon as one’s competitors catch up, what was once an advantage becomes simply the price of admission.
Negotiating a contract and properly documenting it are important functions, but they can only take place in a larger context, the context being a decision by the parties to do business together. The advantage your group offers a prospective contracting partner is the glue that binds.
So what exactly is your group’s competitive advantage? Does it have one? Have you revisited it and updated for the current market? Or, is it something akin to “100% air-conditioned?”
What do you think?
Comment or contact me if you’d like to discuss this post.
Mark F. Weiss
May 07
What A Long-Dead Copywriter Knew About Medical Group Success
Robert Collier, one of the fathers of direct mail advertising, famously advised copywriters to enter the conversation already going on within the customer’s mind.
May 06
Patient Complications Produce Hospital Profits
In my April 8, 2013, blog post Amorality Of Institutions – An Additional Argument For Physician Control Of Hospitals, I argued that hospitals, as institutions, are at best amoral. At the same time, they are driven by profit and their executives bear no true downside risk, no risk of going negative in terms of personal liability. Those points, I posit, support the fact that physicians should run hospitals.
And now, more recently, comes a Wall Street Journal article (Treatment Woes Can Bolster Profits, April 17, 2013) revealing that the campaign to battle hospital complications is being slowed by the fact that hospitals profit from patient complications. On top of that, it costs hospitals significant money to reduce complications.
So what we have are institutions that avoid doing the right thing because it will cost them money out of pocket to achieve a result that will cost them far more in prospective profits.
Obviously, what’s needed is a counter-weight. I suggested two in my April 8, 2013, post: Make hospital executives and administrators personally liable for their decisions. Shift control of healthcare to physicians, putting hospitals back into the position they occupied when hospitals first came into being.
What do you think?
Comment or contact me if you’d like to discuss this post.
Mark F. Weiss
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