Economic pressures, patient and payer demands, and changes in the patterns of care have broken down the trust between hospitals and their voluntary medical staffs – but why has the need to work together never been greater?

The hospital used to function primarily as a workshop for local physicians – the voluntary, independent medical staff. That’s no longer true. Now, payers, regulators, and patients expect the hospital to function as a coherent system, delivering improvements in quality, safety, outcomes, and efficiency that can only be achieved through coordinated, end-to-end processes, carried out by its physicians.

But traditional hospital efforts to control physician behavior – practice purchases, economic credentialing, and unilaterally-imposed process changes – have led to cynicism, detachment, and competition  among medical staff. There has been a fundamental breakdown of trust.

Getting the results that both hospitals and physicians need -- in outcomes, quality of care, patient satisfaction, and business performance – requires renewed collaboration. But as important, it requires new internal structures through which physicians can become full participants in the decision-making, and fully accountable for their share of implementation, and the architects of their own success.

Our service offerings, in organizational integration, clinical service line development, and performance excellence, all are based on making physicians key players in institutional change, engaging and investing them in a vision and goals shared with the hospital.