Dive Brief:
- Forty-two percent of hospitals employed physicians in 2012 compared with 29% in 2003, according to a study published on Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine.
- Researchers looked at performance scores at both types of hospitals and determined physician employment status did not affect quality of care.
- The trend toward hospital employment of physicians doesn't seem to be slowing down. A survey published last week found the percentage of physicians employed by hospitals rose 86% from 2012 to 2015.
Dive Insight:
More and more hospitals are employing physicians, but it isn’t helping them to improve quality scores in mortality rates, readmission rates, lengths of stay, or patient satisfaction. That’s the conclusion researchers made when they tracked performance at 803 hospitals employing physicians for up to two years after they switched employment models and compared them to 2,085 hospitals without physician employees.
The trend toward hospital employment of physicians, driven by various health reform initiatives, isn’t slowing down and has significant impact on the healthcare system. Physician employment status affects reimbursement rates, share of costs paid by patients, and overall system costs. It also affects where and how patients receive care.
Physicians can benefit from hospital employment. It eliminates many burdens associated with running a small or private practice, which is especially important as payment policies seemingly tend to favor large integrated health systems. However, this employment arrangement can also frustrate physicians who might be encouraged to pay more attention to organizational protocols rather than patient-physician relationships and individual patient care, as Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis professor Dr. Richard Gunderman told Medscape Medical News.
Two years of performance data isn’t enough to predict how physician employment status will affect quality in the long run and there are arguments to be made for hospital employment of physicians. However, regulators will likely have to pay close attention to this trend to ensure it isn’t pushing quality and costs in the wrong direction.
