The Doctor and the CFO

By SUHAS GONDI, MD When my classmates and I returned to Boston to continue our first year of medical school early last month, we returned to a very different type of course, called “Essentials of the Profession.” In it, we explored health policy, social medicine, ethics, and other topics outside the realm of traditional physiology and disease but just as important to our roles as physicians. In the health policy class, we learned about escalating healthcare costs and how the landscape of American healthcare is changing. While the inclusion of these topics in our curriculum reflects a significant advance in medical education, our health policy teachings also exposed a critical gap in our training – one that will leave us ill-prepared to meet our future obligations as physicians. Healthcare providers, we learned, are increasingly expected to consider the cost of clinical care, and the costs of care we deliver will influence how much we’ll be paid. Medicare is increasingly tying physician payment to spending benchmarks such that wasteful healthcare services will be punished with lower reimbursements. Further, providers are being pressured by public and private payers to enter into alternative payment models that force physicians to bear financial risk. This means that doctors may lose money if they spend more on patient care than government-set benchmarks. The goal is to incentivize cost-effective care and penalize inefficiency, in stark contrast to the traditional fee-...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs