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The purpose of this paper is to test and measure the outcome of a community hospital in implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) through a co-management arrangement. RQ1: do the benefits of a co-management arrangement outweigh the costs? RQ2: does physician alignment aid in the effective implementation of the ACA directives set for hospitals?

A case study of a 350-bed non-profit community hospital co-management company. The quantitative data are eight quarters of quality metrics prior and eight quarters post establishment of the co-management company. The quality metrics are all based on standardized national requirements from the Joint Commission and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services guidelines. These measures directly impact the quality initiatives under the ACA that are applicable to all healthcare facilities. Qualitative data include survey results from hospital employees of the perceived effectiveness of the co-management company. A paired samples difference of means t-test was conducted to compare the timeframe before co-management and post co-management.

The findings indicate that the benefits of a co-management arrangement do outweigh the costs for both the physicians and the hospital (RQ1). The physicians benefit through actual dollar payout, but also with improved communication and greater input in running the service line. The hospital benefits from reduced cost – or reduced penalties under the ACA – as well as better communication and greater physician involvement in administration of the service line. RQ2: does physician alignment aid in the effective implementation of the ACA directives set for hospitals? The hospital improved in every quality metric under the co-management company. A paired sample difference of means t-test showed a statistically significant improvement in five of the six quality metrics in the study.

Previous research indicates the potential effectiveness of co-management companies in improving healthcare delivery and hospital-physician relations (Sowers et al., 2013). The current research takes this a step further to show that the data do in fact support these concepts. The hospital and the physicians carrying out the day-to-day actions have shared goals, better communication, and improved quality metrics under the co-management company. As the number of co-management companies increases across the USA, more research can be directed at determining their overall impact on quality care.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between patient satisfaction and a variety of clinical quality measures in an ambulatory setting to determine if there is significant overlap between patient satisfaction and clinical quality or if they are separate domains of overall physician quality. Assessing this relationship will help to determine whether there is congruence between different types of clinical quality performance and patient satisfaction and therefore provide insight to appropriate financial structures for physicians.

Ordered probit regression analysis is conducted with overall rating of physician from patient satisfaction responses to the Clinician and Groups Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey as the dependent variable. Physician clinical quality is measured across five composite groups based on 26 Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures aggregated from patient electronic health records. Physician and patient demographic variables are also included in the model.

Better physician performance on HEDIS measures are correlated with increases in patient satisfaction for three composite measures: antibiotics, generics, and vaccination; it has no relationship for chronic conditions and is correlated with decrease in patient satisfaction for preventative measures, although the negative relationship for preventative measures is not robust in sensitivity analysis. In addition, younger physicians and male physicians have higher satisfaction scores even with the HEDIS quality measures in the regression.

There are four primary limitations to this study. First, the data for the study come from a single hospital provider organization. Second, the survey response rate for the satisfaction measure is low. Third, the physician clinical quality measure is the percent of the physician’s relevant patient population that met the HEDIS measure rather than if the measure was met for the individual patient. Finally, it is not possible to distinguish if the significant coefficient estimates on the physician age and gender variables are capturing systematic differences in physician behavior or capturing patient bias.

The results suggest patient satisfaction and physician clinical quality may be complementary, capturing similar aspects of overall physician quality, across some clinical quality measures but for other measures satisfaction and clinical quality are unrelated or negatively related. Therefore, for some clinical quality metrics, it will be important to separately compensate clinical quality and satisfaction and understand the relationship between metrics. Finally, the strong relationship between the level of patient satisfaction and physician age, physician gender, and patient age are important to consider when designing a physician compensation package based on patient satisfaction; if these differences reflect patient bias they could increase inequality among medical staff if compensation is based on patient satisfaction.

This study is the first to use physician organization data to examine patient satisfaction and physician performance on a variety of HEDIS quality metrics.

This paper aims at the implementation and early evaluation of a comprehensive, formative annual physician performance feedback process in a large academic health-care organization.

A mixed methods approach was used to introduce a formative feedback process to provide physicians with comprehensive feedback on performance and to support professional development. This initiative responded to organization-wide engagement surveys through which physicians identified effective performance feedback as a priority. In 2013, physicians primarily affiliated with the organization participated in a performance feedback process, and physician satisfaction and participant perceptions were explored through participant survey responses and physician leader focus groups. Training was required for physician leaders prior to conducting performance feedback discussions.

This process was completed by 98 per cent of eligible physicians, and 30 per cent completed an evaluation survey. While physicians endorsed the concept of a formative feedback process, process improvement opportunities were identified. Qualitative analysis revealed the following process improvement themes: simplify the tool, ensure leaders follow process, eliminate redundancies in data collection (through academic or licensing requirements) and provide objective quality metrics. Following physician leader training on performance feedback, 98 per cent of leaders who completed an evaluation questionnaire agreed or strongly agreed that the performance feedback process was useful and that training objectives were met.

This paper introduces a physician performance feedback model, leadership training approach and first-year implementation outcomes. The results of this study will be useful to health administrators and physician leaders interested in implementing physician performance feedback or improving physician engagement.

Performance metrics have become widely used and much lamented – about tools for measuring healthcare quality. In this paper, the authors reflect on the development and use of performance metrics in healthcare regulation and clinical practice. Studying multi-actor settings of performance measurement systems in healthcare in Sweden and the Netherlands, the authors show how regulatory agencies (i.e., the inspectorate and national registries), patients, hospitals, and practitioners engage in the constitution of healthcare practices through developing performance indicators that form the input for ranking, ensuing intensive dialogues on what should be measured and accounted for, and to what effects. The authors analyze this process as caring for numbers. The authors discern two practices of caring for numbers: validating and contexting. Validating refers to the practices of making numbers reflect those practices they intend to depict; contexting is about how with the use of numbers specific contexts of healthcare are built. These processes together emphasize the performative character of numbers as well as the reflexive uses of performativity. The paper shows how collaborative and rather pragmatic practices of caring for numbers co-construct specific practices of healthcare. Though this reflexive entanglement of production and use of numbers actors not only constitute specific performance metrics and ranking practices but also perform healthcare.

Organizational metrics – including rankings, ratings, and other forms of public assessment – are inextricably tied to uncertainty. Metrics are not only responses to uncertainty in the organizational environment, but they also create new forms of uncertainty within the organizations they evaluate. Given this, it is productive to consider these metrics in relation to the garbage can model of organizational decision making, a framework that was designed to provide insight into uncertain and ambiguous contexts. In this paper, the authors use the case of patient experience surveys to argue for the value of this model for understanding responses to metrics in particular conditions. Specifically, the authors demonstrate how the different features of the garbage can model manifest themselves within organizations managing numbers, and the authors then use these findings to discuss the measurement conditions that promote garbage can responses, the distinctive types of unintended consequences these responses might produce, and the implications of the garbage can model for the understanding of metrics more generally.

Performance measurement has benefited from several management accounting innovations over the past decade. Guiding these advances is the explicit recognition that it is imperative to understand the causal linkage that leads a firm to profitability. In this paper, we contend that the relationship quality experienced between two organizations has a measurable impact on performance. Guided by prior models developed in distribution channel and relationship marketing research (Cannon et al., 2000; Morgan & Hunt, 1994) we build a causal model of relationship quality that identifies key relationship qualities that drive a series of financial and non-financial performance outcomes. Using the healthcare industry to illustrate its applicability, the physician practice – insurance company relationship is described within the context of the model’s constructs and causal linkages. Our model offers managers employing a causal performance measurement system such as, the balanced scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1996) or the action-profit-linkage model (Epstein et al., 2000), a formal framework to analyze observed outcome metrics by assessing the underlying dynamics in their third party relationships. Many of these forces have subtle, but tangible impacts on organizational performance. Recognizing them within performance measurement theory adds explanatory power to existing performance measurement systems.

The long-term financial stability of hospital systems represents a “grand challenge” in health care. New ownership forms, such as private equity (PE), promise to achieve better financial performance than nonprofit or for-profit systems. In this study, we compare two systems with many similarities, but radically different ownership structures, missions, governance, and merger and acquisition (M&A) strategies. Both were nonprofit, religious systems serving low-income communities – Montefiore Health System and Caritas Christi Health Care.

Montefiore's M&A strategy was to invest in local hospitals and create an integrated regional system, increasing revenues by adding primary doctors and community hospitals as feeders into the system and achieving efficiencies through effective resource allocation across specialized units. Slow and steady timing of acquisitions allowed for organizational learning and balancing of debt and equity. By 2019, it owned 11 hospitals with 40,000 employees and had strong positive financials and low reliance on debt.

By contrast, in 2010, PE firm Cerberus Capital bought out Caritas (renamed Steward Health Care System) and took control of the Board of Directors, who set the system's strategic direction. Cerberus used Steward as a platform for a massive debt-driven acquisition strategy. In 2016, it sold off most of its hospitals’ property for $1.25 billion, leaving hospitals saddled with long-term inflated leases; paid itself almost $500 million in dividends; and used the rest for leveraged buyouts of 27 hospitals in 9 states in 3 years. The rapid, scattershot M&A strategy was designed to create a large corporation that could be sold off in five years for financial gain – not for health care integration. Its debt load exploded, and by 2019, its financials were deeply in the red. Its Massachusetts hospitals were the worst financial performers of any system in the state. Cerberus exited Steward in 2020 in a deal that left its physicians, the new owners, holding the debt.

Healthcare facilities are entering an era of increased oversight and heightened expectations concerning both reduced costs and measureable quality. The US Affordable Care Act requires healthcare organizations to collect certain metrics, including patient assessments of quality, in order to monitor and improve the quality of healthcare. These metrics are used as a basis for graduated insurance reimbursements, and are available to consumers as an aid in selecting healthcare providers and insurance plans. The purpose of this paper is to provide healthcare providers with the analytic capabilities to better understand quality of care from the patient’s point of view.

This research examines patient satisfaction data from a multi-specialty Medical Practice Group, and uses regression analysis and paired comparisons to provide insight into patient perceptions of care quality.

Results show that variables related to Access, Moving Through the Visit, Nurse/Assistant, Care Provider and Personal Issues significantly impact overall assessments of care quality. In addition, while gender and type of care provider do not appear to have an impact on overall patient satisfaction, significant differences do exist based on age group, specialty of the physician and clinic type.

This study differs from most academic research as it focusses on medical practices, rather than hospitals, and includes multiple clinic types, medical specialties and physician types in the analysis. The study demonstrates how analytics and patient perceptions of quality can inform policy decisions.

The assignment is to design a plan that aligns patient satisfaction scores with quality care metrics. The instructor’s manual (IM) introduces models for designing and implementing a strategic plan to approach the quality improvement process.

This is a field research case. The author(s) had access to the Chief Operating Officer (COO) and other members of the management team, meeting with them on numerous occasions. Cleveland Clinic Florida (CCF) provided the data included in the appendices. Additionally, relevant hospital data, also included in the appendices, is required to be made public on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) databases. Accordingly, all data and information are provided by original sources.

Osmel “Ozzie” Delgado, MBA and COO of CCF was faced with a dilemma. Under the new CMS reimbursement formula, patient satisfaction survey scores directly impacted hospital reimbursement. However, the CCF patient satisfaction surveys revealed some very unhappy patients. Delgado pondered these results that really made no sense to him because CCF received the highest national and state rankings for its clinical quality at the same time. Clearly, patients were receiving the best medical care, but they were still unhappy. Leaning back in his chair, Delgado shook his head and wondered incredulously how one of the most famous hospitals in the world could deliver such great care but receive negative patient feedback on CMS surveys. What was going wrong and how was the hospital going to fix it?

This case is designed for graduate Master’s in Business Administration (MBA), Master’s in Health Sciences Administration (MHSA) and/or Public Health (PA) audiences. While a healthcare concentration is useful, the case raises the generic business problems of satisfying the customer to increase brand recognition in the marketplace and displacing competition to increase annual revenues. Indeed, the same analysis can be applied in other heavily regulated industries also suffering from a change in liquidity and growth occasioned by regulatory change.

Researchers recommend a reorganization of the medical profession into larger groups with a multispecialty mix. We analyze whether there is evidence for the superiority of these models and if this organizational transformation is underway.

We summarize the evidence on scale and scope economies in physician group practice, and then review the trends in physician group size and specialty mix to conduct survivorship tests of the most efficient models.

The distribution of physician groups exhibits two interesting tails. In the lower tail, a large percentage of physicians continue to practice in small, physician-owned practices. In the upper tail, there is a small but rapidly growing percentage of large groups that have been organized primarily by non-physician owners.

While our analysis includes no original data, it does collate all known surveys of physician practice characteristics and group practice formation to provide a consistent picture of physician organization.

Our review suggests that scale and scope economies in physician practice are limited. This may explain why most physicians have retained their small practices.

Larger, multispecialty groups have been primarily organized by non-physician owners in vertically integrated arrangements. There is little evidence supporting the efficiencies of such models and some concern they may pose anticompetitive threats.

This is the first comprehensive review of the scale and scope economies of physician practice in nearly two decades. The research results do not appear to have changed much; nor has much changed in physician practice organization.