Clinician Groups: Amid Widespread Healthcare Consolidation, What Are Your Choices?
It’s been described as “a cyclical arms race,” as well as a Game of Thrones-style struggle for dominance over the healthcare kingdom. Whatever you call it, the widespread consolidation of health insurers on the one side and hospitals and health systems on the other leaves clinician groups with a difficult choice to make. They can grow organically by winning new business, hang a for sale sign in the window and hope for the best or join with other like-minded groups who share their values.
Our team has chosen the latter.
Amid monumental market and regulatory shifts, forming US Acute Care Solutions (USACS) was the right move at the right time with the right partners. The new group is committed to the principle that the best patient care results when providers maintain control of their own practice. That’s something I’ve always believed, and so have the other physician groups we’ve teamed with. We hope to continue adding partner groups who share our mission.
With the right capital partner, we also now have the necessary resources and experience to support growth and ensure success. As a physician owned and led group with national scope and resources, we are better positioned to hire the best providers in the country, compete directly with the large, publicly owned groups that have long dominated the industry and continue to expand our solution offerings. It’s an exciting time, but certainly not for the faint of heart.
Maintaining Core Values
It can be difficult to talk about core values amid talk of mergers, acquisitions and competitive regulatory pressures. The analyst from Deutsche bank who called the wave of consolidation “a cyclical arms race” certainly doesn’t leave much room for discussion of core values. And if there’s any lesson from Game of Thrones, it’s that those who hold to their values tend to meet an early and gruesome demise.
But we truly believe that it’s precisely our values which help make our company more competitive than those solely focused on the bottom line. Physician ownership and management matter when it comes to delivering for patients and our hospital partners, because physicians who have a stake in their company’s success are aligned to do their best possible work.
Integrated Acute Care
Aside from building a company we can be proud of, though, the job of senior leadership is surely to continually seek out ways to put the company in the best possible position for success. If you just keep your blinders on and keep doing what you’ve been doing, chances are you’ll look around in a few years and find out you don’t really have a growing company, and you’ll be in an even more precarious position.
Over the past few years, our partners have been looking for ways to help our hospital partners achieve the triple aim: create efficiencies, lower costs and improve patient outcomes. As a result, we have expanded our solutions with leading clinicians, proven processes and state-of-the-art technology. By integrating emergency, hospital and observation medicine, we bring hospital systems into alignment, delivering value, not just volume.
When you are faced with the difficult decision to stay put, sell or join a like-minded group, we hope you keep USACS in mind. If you think you might be a good fit, please reach out to talk to a member of our team.