Skip to main content

PHOs As Transitional Models For ACOs

Still operating that PHO - Physician-Hospital Organization?  It may be a relic of 1990's-style managed care but I'll bet you learned many hard-won lessons along the way.  Don't give up now.

Instead, use it as a stepping stone to a successful Accountable Care Organization (ACO.)  Improve your risk-sharing models, add healthy doses of transparency and physician leadership, and you just might have something there.

While I'm at it, I spent yesterday in Chicago's western suburbs with a full day of meetings and networking. On one entrepreneurial project specifically, the discussion pointed out that my thinking on possibilities and potentials was WAY too constrained, by a factor of 10. Funny. I usually have the opposite problem, but in this case I'm thrilled to think millions, not tens of thousands. Thanks to all who helped with ideas and alternatives.

And the day concluded wonderfully in a meeting with a hospital that truly understands what "competing on analytics" is all about. Get better by getting smarter, faster!

I'd love to hear from you.  Connect with me on Linkedin.  I'm an open networker and don't IDK, so don't hesitate sending me an invitation to connect.  Or follow me on Twitter (@whatifwhynot).  E-mail me at healthcarestrategist@gmail.com.   All Steve Davis, all the time.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor

Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare

My Take On Anthem-Cigna, Big Dumb Companies and the Executives Who Run Them

After last Friday's Appeals Court decision, Anthem's hostile takeover of, er, merger with Cigna has but a faint pulse. Good. Unplug the respirator. Cigna's figured it out but Anthem is like that late-late horror show where the corpse refuses to die. Meanwhile, 150 McKinsey consultants are on standby for post-merger "integration" support. I guess "no deal, no paycheck..." is powerfully motivating to keep the patient alive a while longer. In court, Anthem argued that assembling a $54 billion behemoth is a necessary precondition to sparking all manner of wondrous innovations and delivering $2.4 billion in efficiencies. The basic argument appears to be "We need to double in size to grow a brain. And just imagine all those savings translating directly into lower premiums for employers and consumers."  Stop. Read that paragraph again. Ignore the dubious "lower premiums" argument and focus on the deal's savings. $2.4 billion saved