Is Healthcare Reform Good News for Hospitals?

Dagen McDowell, Fox Business News, interviews Compass Clinical Consulting Managing Director Kate Fenner on the impact of the healthcare reform law on the nation’s hospitals.

There’s a lot of guessing about the impact of the Reform Act on hospital operations and bottom lines. A few patterns of prediction are emerging and , as in any major change, there will be winners and losers.

We’re witnessing significant commitments of investor money to hospital acquisitions, as the Detroit Medical Center and Caritas Christi announcements demonstrate and these folks don’t usually make dumb bets so they obviously think there is money to be gained in hospitals.

Two other trends are even more predictable for the impact of reform on hospital leaders.

The implications of these two very predictable trends are to get your house in order both in terms of compliance and through put.
First: there will be increased scrutiny as regulators seek to find and punish poor quality operations. We will see more state department of health surveys for cause and complaint response and more hospitals experiencing Immediate Jeopardy and threats of CMS termination based on same. The urgency to single out poor performers, whether accurate or not, will only grow.

Second: if the Massachusetts experience is in any way emulated as expanded coverage impacts, we’ll see a tremendous uptick in demand for care. More people covered will seek care for conditions they have ignored.

This does not mean you have to turn your entire hospital upside-down.

A more sensible approach might well be to focus on departments that are most likely to be impacted or that need improved efficiency or quality. For example, many of these “new to healthcare” patients who are unable to find an available primary care physician will likely enter the system through the ER. Is your ER efficient to handle a surge? What about the other departments that in turn are most likely to see admitted patients from ER such as surgical services or various nursing departments or increased demand on radiology or pharmacy. Working on areas where you know you have corrective issues now will prepare you to handle what seems to be a predictable outcome of reform.