Introducing The Bard Index™
The Bard Index is a new product offering from The Bard Group, LLC. It provides a cost-effective and timely assessment of the current state of a healthcare organization’s relationships with its medical staff and offers concrete options for improvement where appropriate.

The importance of physician–hospital relationships
Many of the most widespread trends in healthcare call for responses from both hospitals and physicians that they must work together to deliver. Some examples:

• Patients and payers increasingly make their choices based on publicly-available hospital and physician report cards
• Both government and private insurers are turning to the use of outcomes as the basis for payment
• Concern across the board with rising healthcare costs has renewed interest in global capitation arrangements
• Even credit rating agencies are beginning to require evidence of effective physician–hospital collaboration

Any effort to address these challenges necessarily requires a new kind of partnership between healthcare organizations and their physicians. For hospitals, in particular, productive collaboration with physicians has become essential to virtually every strategy.

Many healthcare organizations have established economic relationships with members of their medical staff as a path to collaboration. While such initiatives have their place, in and of themselves they rarely achieve the level of partnership that is required to drive quality of care and the achievement of business performance objectives. Furthermore, economic relationships are becoming more difficult and less rewarding under recently promulgated Stark III rules. It’s not enough for physicians and hospitals to collaborate on economic grounds; the collaboration must be operational and strategic as well. Meeting today’s challenges requires effective structures and processes, as well as cultures that enable physicians and hospitals to reconcile and accommodate each others’ interests.

What are effective physician–hospital relationships?
In over twenty years of experience working with physicians and healthcare organizations, we have learned that effective physician–hospital relationships have certain observable characteristics that fall into the following dimensions:

• Meaningful participation of physicians in strategic and operational decision-making
• Structures and processes the medical staff will use to resolve issues among its members
• Physician leaders with well-developed leadership skills 
• Organization-wide communication loops
• Performance goals that are generated at the local level
• Demonstrated physician respect for the interests and needs of the hospital
• Demonstrated hospital respect for the interests and needs of physicians

The Bard Index is designed to gauge the current state of physician–hospital relationships by evaluating these indicators.

The Bard Index—a cost-effective, contained approach to assessment
The Bard Index consists of a convenient Web-based survey, personal interviews of key physician and hospital leaders, a debriefing on findings and recommendations, and profiles of potential relationship options. The Bard Index:

• Pinpoints areas and specific issues on which to focus attention
• Recognizes aspects of the relationship that appear to be working well
• Identifies strategic and operational options for building physician-hospital relationships

The entire assessment takes place over the course of just a few weeks, and results in a clear snapshot of the relationship between an organization and its physicians—and how it can be made stronger and more productive.

For more information about The Bard Index and how it can help your organization, please contact Lisa Levine, MD, MBA, at 781-514-1909 or e-mail at llevine@bardgroup.com. You can learn more about The Bard Group’s services on the Web, at http://www.bardgroup/bardindex/com.