"How Employed Physicians' Contracts May Threaten Their Patients and Professionalism" Authored by Health Care Renewal Bloggers Published in Annals of Internal Medicine

We have noted that increasing numbers of physicians provide patient care as employees of large organizations, often hospital systems, sometimes for-profit.  Since in these settings physicians must answer to generic management which may be more concerned with short-term revenues than patient care, these new arrangements are frought with hazards for physicians and patients. One set of hazards may be found in the contracts employed physicians must sign.   My fellow blogger, Dr Wally Smith, and I authored an article just published online "How Employed Physicians' Contracts May Threaten Their Patients and Professionalism." Here is the link.In it we listed multiple contractual provisions that may be found in employed physicians contracts  that may threaten professionalism and good patient care: Confidentiality clauses - which may hide quality and safety problems, medical errors, unethical conduct, other problematic contract clauses, and malfeasanceProductivity clauses - which may provide incentives for actions that primarily increase employers' revenues, and thus may encourage overtreatment"Leakage control" clauses - which may discourage referrals outside of the employers' systems and thus discourage appropriate referrals for particular patients, potentially threatening qualityClauses that allow termination without cause - which may reduce access for the terminated physicians' patients, and may discourage complaints by physicians about quality, safety, unethical...

Source: Health Care Renewal - March 9, 2016 Category: Health Management Tags: Annals of Internal Medicine contracts corporate physician generic managers hospital systems hospitals Source Type: blogs