Are you interested in improving health outcomes, taking advantage of performance-based payment programs, lawfully bargaining collectively with payers or raising capital to implement health IT in your practice? If you answered “yes” to any of this, then collaboration with other physicians and medical practices may be a good option for you. Learn several ways you can integrate, from a basic clinical level to more advanced arrangements.
As a physician, you have many collaborative options available to you, and just taking initial collaborative steps can produce important benefits for your practice. Here are several examples of how physicians can collaborate, from a new AMA guide, a free resource that can help physicians learn more about the integration landscape and how they might fit in.
- Standardize care using accepted clinical guidelines. One of the most basic ways to collaborate is to adopt clinical guidelines based on evidence or consensus, around which you can standardize care among your peers. For example, all primary care physicians in a practice may agree to treat all patients with diabetes according to a specific clinical guideline. By standardizing care, you can facilitate data collection and other processes that can help improve health outcomes.
- Verbally agree to referral guidelines with a partner. An informal clinical collaboration can take shape between as few as two physicians. For instance, a primary care physician and an ophthalmologist could agree to work closely together to effectively manage the care of their mutual diabetes patients to reduce these patients’ visits to the emergency department.
- Formally share clinical information. For example, a primary care physician might make an agreement with a hospital in which the hospital would alert the physician when any of the physician’s diabetic patients are discharged from the emergency department. Then, the physician can take immediate action to ensure these patients have follow-up appointments to discuss their diabetes management and prevent future emergency department visits.
- Join an independent practice association (IPA) for specific administrative services. IPAs can provide many of the advantages of larger groups without individual physicians giving up their practice autonomy. For example, an IPA might get a contract offer from a health insurer that it then shares with its member physicians. The IPA could provide an analysis of key contract provisions to help the physicians decide whether or not they individually want to sign the contract. In some cases, the member physicians might also collectively fund additional services, such as having the association handle prior authorization activities or billing on behalf of its members.
- Join a clinically integrated network. Joining a clinically integrated network, such as an accountable care organization or IPA, can help physicians take advantage of opportunities presented by care delivery and payment reforms. Such collaborations can enable success in value-based payment initiatives that reward physicians financially for meeting certain clinical quality measures.
Collaborations such as these can allow you to maintain your autonomy and low levels of risk. And the possibilities aren’t limited to these examples.
“Indeed, the type of collaborative arrangement a group of physicians can adopt is really a function of their creativity and understanding of what patients, employers, health insurers and other payers want,” according to the AMA guide.
Watch AMA Wire® for more ways physicians can collaborate and the legal considerations for integrations and mergers.
