With health reform under way, it's no wonder that finances around quality are keeping hospital CEOs up at night. Chief executives at Thomson Reuters's top named 100 hospitals said their challenges were reduced reimbursements and new payment models, according to a survey released on Wednesday.
"Our biggest challenge over the next one to three years will be cuts from Medicare and more pay-for-performance issues that could impact us financially," said President and CEO Chris Karam of Texas's Christus St. Michael Health System in the report.
Moving away from fee-for-service, hospital CEOs said they are gearing up for new payment systems and patient management.
"Clearly, positioning ourselves for the new era of value-based purchasing in the midst of so many unknowns is going to be important. We know that we're going to be very accountable for what we do, that everything will be more transparent, and that we're going to be facing reimbursement models that are diametrically opposite to what we have now," said President and CEO Georgia Fojtasek of Allegiance Health in Michigan."To change without imploding the current model will require a careful transition along with managing in the current fee for service environment. These are enormous leadership challenges."
CEOs ranked the following as in order of importance:
- Physician alignment
- Quality measurement
- Cost reduction
- Information connectivity and health information exchanges
- Patient engagement/communication
- Changing payment models
- Disease management and population-based health management
- ACOs
- Patient wellness programs
Interestingly enough, even with recent national attention on the bottom three on the important list (disease management, ACOs, and patient wellness programs), CEOs said they were nice to have but not top priority at the moment. They cited not knowing their specific role in disease management, ambiguity around ACOs, and little financial incentive for wellness programs as reasons why these issues were lower priority.
For more information:
- read the press release
- check out the report (.pdf)
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