Restructuring hospital-physician relationships for future success.

ABSTRACT

Integrating physicians into the Healthfirst administration through employment sowed seeds of mutual understanding among these two groups that would benefit the system immeasurably over the next several years. The immediate future, however, saw only cultural upheaval between our hospitals and newly employed physicians, hospitals and nonemployed physicians, employed and nonemployed physicians, as well as specialists and primary care providers. Traditional physician-relationship-building efforts became difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. Essentially, administration was forced to scrap ten years of physician-development plans in order to reconfigure a relations effort that would maintain hospital support from all sides while restructuring the employed medical group. This article describes the evolution of Healthfirst's approach to maintaining effective physician relationships within our healthcare system and its affiliated entities over the past decade. Specifically, the article details the manner in which our system has evolved physician-relations activity to maintain an effective strategy during times of significant change in the healthcare industry.