https://mailchi.mp/73102bc1514d/the-weekly-gist-may-19-2023?e=d1e747d2d8

We caught up recently with a healthcare leader who had spent time in Atlanta in a previous role, and the conversation turned to last year’s closure of Atlanta Medical Center.

One major impact: the closure immediately left the Atlanta metro region, home to over 6M people, with only one Level 1 trauma center (a second Level 1 center opened an hour north of the city in February). “It’s devastating for the community to lose those services,” he shared, “but I also get why the health system made that choice, given how hard the economy has hit hospitals.” When all health systems are feeling the worst margin pressures in more than a decade, most would be reticent to step in and launch a new trauma program, which despite bringing prestige, is often a money-loser. 

The conversation got us thinking about whether healthcare needs a new approach to securing essential services needed by the community which aren’t well supported by the payment system. 

Our current model largely relies on nonprofit systems to meet the community need as a tenet of that status. But as one CMO shared, “If there’s more than one system in the market, we toss the responsibility back and forth like a hot potato.”

His solution: there needs to be top-down redesign of urgently needed critical services like trauma and behavioral health, as well as highly specialized services like transplant and pediatric subspecialty care, which he considered oversupplied in his market, with multiple subscale programs.

His hope was that health systems could cross competitive lines and collaborate to think about a rational approach to “regional healthcare master planning”, along with a new funding model.

It’s a tall order, he continued, but if health systems can’t find a solution on their own, they leave themselves open to government intervention that might mandate a solution—or further questions of the value communities are receiving from supporting nonprofit status.