Physician Workforce

It was standing room only at a January physician education event in South Carolina as 140-plus providers in the Palmetto Health Quality Collaborative gathered from around the state’s Midlands region. The topic: the Quality Payment Program, which is Medicare’s new physician payment program.
Trustee talking points As health care transforms, the health care workforce will have to change, too. Hospital boards should make workforce planning and development part of their strategic process. Self-assessment is critical for hospitals to begin workforce planning. A diverse workforce…
Trustee talking points A growing number of small and rural hospitals, unable to recruit or afford physician hospitalists, are staffing their hospital medicine programs with nurse practitioners. Hospitals that use this approach must comply with state and federal regulations regarding scope of…
Physician engagement in value-based care is an increasingly critical issue for health care boards. Many organizations are focusing on financial incentives to encourage physicians to move the needle toward value, but remuneration is a blunt tool and only one among many that can influence …
When the independent primary care group that served Rusk County Memorial Hospital started referring patients to a competing facility in another community, the critical access hospital in Ladysmith, Wis., faced a crisis. The hospital’s market share fell from 43 percent to 21 percent from 2011…
A friend of mine who’s a colorectal surgeon in a city far from my home in Utah told me a fascinating story recently about how colonoscopies are performed in the hospital where he practices. He said he’s done over 22,000 colonoscopies without a single bowel perforation, and he regularly gets calls…
Is there a more intimidating phrase out there today than Big Data? It sounds like some sort of bully. Oh-oh, avert your eyes, Big Data is swaggering this way.
Perhaps the greatest challenge health care organizations face over the next decade is physician engagement. As integration and value-driven care continue to advance, physician leaders will be increasingly called upon to meet the demands of a changing landscape. “Effective physician leadership will…