Hospitals that employ their own EM and HM physicians face formidable challenges: clinician recruitment and retention, clinical leadership development and accountability, performance management, and documentation and revenue cycle efficiencies, to name a few.
The burden is no less on clinicians themselves. The 2021 Medscape Physician Compensation Report, which surveyed nearly 18,000 physicians across 29 specialties, found that out of the 50 or so hours worked per week, 15.6 (roughly 30 percent) were spent performing administrative functions.
In its position paper, “Patients Before Paperwork,” the American College of Physicians stated, “Administrative tasks that cannot be eliminated from the health care system must be regularly reviewed, revised, aligned, and/or streamlined in a transparent manner, with the goal of minimizing burden, by all stakeholders involved.”
Rather than shoulder the management burden entirely or outsource physician staffing completely, hospitals have a middle-ground option: Outsource the management of their employed clinicians.
Practice management services organizations (MSO) can provide the necessary management functions to help reduce the hospital’s and its employed clinician’s administrative burdens. MSOs take on tasks such as medical staff integration and collaboration, improving access to clinical leadership and development, and providing detailed reporting and analytics capabilities.
This service frees hospital leadership and clinicians to focus on improving organizational culture and clinical excellence, creating a more engaging environment for staff and a more welcoming space for patients.
Here are the top eight reasons to outsource management of your employed clinicians.
1. Tracking Operational & Financial Performance
The current reimbursement environment is forcing hospital administrators to evaluate provider productivity and program performance more closely. However, tracking operational and financial performance requires a great deal of work, time, and data—too much for one person.
You can divide and conquer by putting a management team in place. Outsourcing allows the spread of operational and performance tracking responsibilities among a group of people who can streamline collaboration and provide continuous oversight.
You retain control. The group stays abreast of the ever-changing reimbursement rules, guides the EM and HM physicians to reach hospital goals, and is fully accountable for the results.
2. Documentation and Revenue
Accurate documentation equates to precise and maximized billing and it’s another reason to work with an experienced outsourced partner that can make improvements quickly, with minimal disruption. Removing documentation barriers means having charts that accurately document patient care, so hospitals get paid for work being done without costly adjustments and back and forth communications.
3. Coordination & Integration
Coordination and integration with current hospital leadership are two of the biggest headaches in working with an outsourced management partner. However, working with a partner dedicated to collaboration, one that has experience integrating and aligning goals with current hospital leadership relieves the discomfort.
4. Enhanced Flexibility
Outsourced practice management partners put more resources at your disposal. A team of experts is more able to adjust and flex as needs fluctuate. It is a model with high scalability that can meet changes in demand.
5. Success in Value-based Care
Hospitals are under pressure to find sustainable ways to support value-based care.
A 2019 survey from Black Book Market Research LLC found that 90 percent of hospital leaders surveyed evaluated the efficacy of working with third-party vendors to free up internal resources and reduce costs for value-based care success.
“Value-based care reforms have put pressure on hospitals to decrease inpatient volumes, achieve outcomes goals and provide cost-effective care,” said Doug Brown, Black Book’s president. “As hospitals look for ways to reduce costs particularly implementing value-based care programs, outsourcing is a valid strategy to achieve a financially healthier organization.”
6. Expert Advantages
Outsourced partners have expertise in specific departments and product lines that hospitals can take advantage of. They can apply the knowledge gained from multiple facilities across a range of specialties and sizes to your setting. Such arrangements allow hospital management to concentrate more on the big picture of running the institution while assigning duties to outside firms with a much more specific focus.
7. Reduced Cost & Enhanced Revenues
Among the many benefits an MSO can offer hospitals, cost efficiency and enhanced revenue are often the most attractive. For example, by aggregating volumes, MSOs can achieve economies of scale that allow them to getpreferential prices on everything from medical supplies to health insurance. Regarding revenue, they can also expand growth opportunities by employing more efficient reimbursement processes, accurate coding and collection practices, improved documentation and billing, and maximized operational throughput.
8. Provider and Patient Satisfaction
When you curtail administrative burdens at all levels, including those born by physicians, you foster a positive work environment that results in greater provider satisfaction—and happy providers equate to happy patients.
MSOs enable hospital administrators to give hospital-employed providers what they want: the clinical autonomy to practice in an efficient, high quality, and patient-centric way. The result is a clinical milieu that promotes provider and patient loyalty.
Conclusion
Management outsourcing of employed physicians is a common-sense approach that hospitals can use to keep physicians while offloading administrative burdens. Many companies offer outsourced management services, however, so why consider SCP Health? For a couple of reasons:
We work with hospitals, urgent care centers, and physician groups nationwide, implementing practice management and support solutions to deliver high success, affordable, and appropriate care. Also, SCP Health has proven experience across a variety of health care organizations in optimizing their employed providers and associated program performance.
Contact us to learn more about how SCP Health’s practice management solutions can help you optimize your investment in employed providers. Call (800) 902-3627 or email Business_Development@scp-health.com. We look forward to hearing from you.