Let’s say you are the leader of a medical group. It could be a small group of a handful of physicians. Or, you could be the President and CEO of a 600 or 6,000 provider group. It does not make any difference.
Category: The Business of Healthcare
Discussing the business side of all things healthcare.
A diamond and a rock, sitting side by side. Both discovered near the bottom of the Udachny diamond mine in the Sakha Republic region of Russia, one of the world’s ten deepest open-pit diamond mines.
Super Bowl commercials garner all sorts of buzz for being “creative,” but creativity isn’t selling.
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In reality, the "CEO" never really owned his business. He was simply its caretaker. He just realized it a bit too late.
today, employers reward for the value you create. The factory worker, whether in what is readily recognized as a factory or one which looks, to outsiders, like a medical clinic or hospital, who simply shows up on time, does what he or she is told (you know, follows protocols) and then clocks out at the end of the shift, creates no real value in comparison with the next worker.
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Don’t do what your competitors are doing just because they’re doing it or because you might get some award for it.
Today, there’s no longer even the “promise” of lifetime employment. “Retirement” as in replacement, replacement just like an old machine, is as far off as the next layoff or the next outsourcing.
A few months ago, while waiting at the gate for a flight, I couldn’t help but notice a gate agent making some woman unpack and repack and unpack and repack her expandable carry-on suitcase because it was too wide to fit into the measuring “box” for carry-on luggage.
Last week (November 20, 2018), I mentioned the increase in the physician dissatisfaction index, which now tops out at 3.95 out of a possible 5. See my Success in Motion video, Physician Misery Index Jumps Up Due To Dissatisfaction.
The survey, conducted annually by the data technology firm Geneia, found that 87% of surveyed physicians say that it’s increasingly harder to spend time in an honest, engaged patient encounter, and that they’re personally at risk of burnout.
Drilling down into the data reveals some particularly interesting details that appear to counter the sales pitch used by hospitals and by corporate/investor-owned healthcare vehicles alike when courting practice acquisitions: “You just practice medicine and we’ll do everything else. After all, you didn’t go into medicine to run a business.”
Close to all (91%) of hospital or corporate employed physicians responding to the survey reported diminished joy in their jobs due to increased demand for data reporting. That level of dissatisfaction far outpaces that of physicians working independently or with true physician-owned practices.
Practice sales make sense some of the time for some physicians. The rest of the time, they don’t.
It’s important that you vet any combination for far more than sales price unless you’re taking the money and running.
Comment or contact me if you’d like to discuss this post.
Mark F. Weiss
I’m writing this on a Saturday, a couple of days before publication. I’m about to head off to meet with a futurist to brainstorm some ideas.
Speaking of the future, lots of people are talking about driverless cars.
Suppose those people who want to sell us driverless cars, or to force us into driverless cars, are right and that we’ll all be driving in them. What’s the impact on healthcare? What’s the impact on your practice?
Assuming, and yes, it is a very big assumption, that driverless (that is, people programmed) cars might actually be safer than people driven cars, will there be fewer accidents? According to Centers for Disease Control data, in 2006, 3.2 million people received non-fatal injuries from auto accidents. And, according to a 2013 report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, auto accidents resulted in approximately 2.8 million emergency department visits in 2010, which was around 15% of total emergency department visits for injury that year.
What happens if that business (no, I’m not coldhearted, but I’m writing this for healthcare providers) goes away? What’s the impact on the number of emergency department physicians needed? What’s the impact on the amount of nurses needed? What’s the impact on the number of hospital beds needed? What’s the impact on the number of specialist consults and surgeries and physical therapy and on and on? What’s the loss to the bottom line?
Yes, I’m warming up for the discussion with the futurist. This part of the warm up fits well with my own “futuristic” work, my book, The Impending Death of Hospitals.
But this self-driving car trend and many others and the way they intersect help lubricate the mind and lubricate the discussions among medical group and other healthcare leaders in exploring alternative futures, futures into which you must project your practice or business. That is, unless you want a driverless car to drive you to the poorhouse.
What are you doing to envision your future?
Comment or contact me if you’d like to discuss this post.
Mark F. Weiss
