Over the past few weeks we’ve fielded a spate of questions from health system executives wondering about their peers’ plans for employees to return to the office. Some who have set a January 1st target for employees to return to their physical workspaces are now reconsidering.
“The first of the year sounded good back in the summer, but now it seems kind of arbitrary,” one system COO told us. “And if we really are entering a winter ‘third wave’ of COVID, it may not be a sound decision for health reasons, either.”Many have been positively surprised by the levels of communication and productivity since many employees began telecommuting full-time back in the spring. “It would be one thing to tell people they had to come back if the work wasn’t getting done. But for many, productivity has actually been better,” one executive shared.
Eight months into the work-from-home experiment (and with a handful of high-profile companies like Twitter saying employees can work from home forever), some leaders are now wondering whether they too should allow some staff to work from home permanently. The opportunities are obvious: real estate and overhead cost savings, and a potential boost to employee engagement and retention. But contemplating a long-term shift raises big questions.
As remote workers in expensive markets look to move to lower-cost cities, or even to states with lower tax rates, does a geographic connection to the area matter? As new staff who have never met in person are added, can culture and teambuilding be sustained? And how to blend operations and communication across remote staff and those who work in the office, by choice or necessity? (“In-person meetings are great, Zoom meetings have gotten better, but the ones where half of us are in a conference room and the other half are dialing in feel like a death knell,” one physician leader told us.)
The pandemic has likely launched a lasting shift toward “work anywhere”. But in order to capture the benefits of remote or flexible work, leaders must invest time and resources to rethink and transform the way they onboard, manage, operate, and communicate with the hybrid teams of the future.
Abstract: This article focuses on the correct strategic response to the impending implementation of price transparency on New Year’s Day of next year.
I have stated before that I have multiple articles in process at any given time. Some of them have been ‘in process’ for years because newer topics sometimes rise to the queue’s top. Price transparency is an example of such a case. I have a friend who is developing AI-enabled solutions to help organizations respond to price transparency government diktats. Few people beyond healthcare CFOs, healthcare financial consultants, and accountants have any useful understanding of how convoluted hospital pricing has become due to decades of ill-conceived government policy for the most part.
Another problem is endless confusion over terms. People frequently interchange the terms ‘price’, ‘cost’, ‘payment’, and ‘reimbursement’ in situations where the polar opposite is true on the other side of the issue. In other words, ‘cost’ to a payor is price or reimbursement to a provider.
Anyway, my friend’s questions finally inspired me to go to the Federal Register, acquire the final rule, and begin the process of learning where government is headed with these regulations. There are probably at least fifty diatribe angles I could launch into over the final rule, but I will confine my rant to only a couple of points.
First, the final draft of the rule is ‘only’ 331 pages long. The three-column final rule in the Federal Register is ‘only’ 83 pages long. That pales compared to Obamacare that is over 1,200 pages long, so by government standards, this is but a trifle of regulation.
Secondly, some parts of the final rule are actually funny. For example, CMS estimates that the average hospital will spend only 150 staff hours in the first and 46 staff hours in subsequent years complying with price transparency requirements. Is it constitutional for government to compel private enterprises to disclose the terms of what they thought were private contracts? Apparently so. Once government breaks this ice, will any agreement of any type ever be private?
As I have discussed price transparency with healthcare leaders, I sense that leaders are currently focused on technical compliance with the regulations. With COVID on their plate simultaneously, they have little capacity to take on strategic financial planning.
The final rule lays out in excruciating detail what providers face complying with the regulation. Reading the comments and responses is equally entertaining. CMS repeatedly says something to the effect; we heard your concern, and we’re proceeding as planned anyway. Litigation brought by the AHA and others has to date been unsuccessful in slowing stopping the price transparency snowball that is now most of the way down the mountain.
So, what are you supposed to do? The CFO and CIO will work, possibly with consultants’ assistance, to prepare the organization’s data release. Soon after the release occurs, expect the defecation to hit the rotary oscillator. The press will call out organizations with high prices, and the rancor over learning what some systems have been able to get from third-party payors will be entertaining, to say the least. Many people believe that one of the primary motivators of the massive consolidation occurring in the healthcare industry is the market leverage exerted by growing systems on third-party payors to obtain otherwise unachievable reimbursement rates.
Regardless of the course of action following price releases in January, the intended and most likely result of this initiative is to drive prices to a lower common denominator. A lot of people think Medicare rates will become that benchmark. There are two significant issues that I did not see addressed in the pricing rule that will have the effect of transferring substantial risk to providers.
The first is that there will be little if any provision for recognition of complications, comorbidities, and hospital-acquired conditions that can dramatically impact the cost of care in a given diagnosis.
The second is the elephant in the room. The current pricing system has developed over time to facilitate cross-subsidization among payors. There is a reason that commercial rates are so high that has nothing to do with the cost of providing care. I have stated before that, government has turned the entire healthcare industry into a taxing authority to extract tax from commercial payors for the benefit of government payors that routinely reimburse providers below the cost of providing care. It has been entertaining to watch the reaction of Boards of Directors when they first realize that the healthcare system has been forced by government into a wealth redistribution mechanism.
So, what happens as providers lose the ability to cross-subsidize the cost of care? Very few hospitals (<10%) are profitable on Medicare, and it is doubtful that any hospital is breaking even on services provided to Medicaid patients. In my experience, hospital reimbursement for self-pay patients is less than 5% of charges. If the prices hospitals realize for services start falling and they lose the current ability to cross-subsidize the cost of care . . . . . well, you don’t need an MBA to understand the likely outcome.
What to do? If (when) prices start falling and providers lose pricing leverage, the only place to turn is operating expense. Hospitals that have failed to undertake serious, highly focused, and robust operating cost reduction programs that yield quantifiable results may not have a very bright future. If your organization is not in the bottom quartile of operating cost compared to its peer group and part of your mission is to remain independent, you must be losing sleep. In a recent article related to COVID Response, I argued that the time has come to get after clinical process variance that is the source of most of the high cost, waste, and abuse in the healthcare system.For most organizations, the days of sourcing cheaper supplies and sending nurses home early are, for the most part, over as there is little if any juice remaining in that lemon.
If, as a leader, you do not have a plan that gets you to break-even on Medicare within the next 12-18 months, you had better have a plan B, something like tuning up your CV. I can help you with your response to price transparency, working on your CV, or helping manage your next career transition as the case may turn out. I am as close as your phone. Best of luck.
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For the past three years, Kaufman Hall has surveyed hospitals and health systems on their performance improvement and cost transformation efforts. This year, these efforts met an historic challenge with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic’s impacts have been severe. Entire service lines were shut down as state governments required or strongly encouraged suspension of elective and non-emergency procedures, in part to conserve critical resources—including personal protective equipment—in the early days of the pandemic. Supply chains were disrupted, with organizations that had come to rely on “just in time” inventory practices scrambling to secure the resources needed to ensure the safety of patients and frontline clinical staff. The healthcare workforce came under incredible pressure, confronting a crisis that threatened to overwhelm the health system’s capacity to treat patients.
In a year unlike any other, our annual survey moved away from the questions of earlier years. We have focused on the impacts of COVID-19 on hospital and health system performance. Then, through interviews with survey respondents on the front line of the battle with COVID-19, we have sought to understand how health system leaders are seeking to find a path forward amid uncertainty that will likely stretch through 2021, if not beyond.
Key findings from this year’s report include the following:
Financial viability. Approximately three fourths of survey respondents are either extremely (22%) or moderately (52%) concerned about the financial viability of their organization in the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment.
Operating margins. One third of our respondents saw year-over-year operating margin declines in excess of 100% from Q2 2019 to Q2 2020.
Volumes. Volumes in most service areas are recovering slowly. In only one area—oncology—have a majority of our respondents seen volumes return to more than 90% of pre-pandemic levels.
Expenses. A majority of survey respondents have seen their greatest percentage expense increase in the costs of supplying personal protective equipment. Nursing staff labor is in second place, cited by 34% of respondents as their most significant area of expense increase.
Healthcare workforce. Three fourths of survey respondents have increased monitoring and resources to address staff burnout and mental health concerns.
Telehealth. More than half of our respondents have seen the number of telehealth visits at their organization increase by more than 100% since the pandemic began. Payment disparities between telehealth and in-person visits are seen as the greatest obstacle to more widespread adoption of telehealth.
Competition. Approximately one third of survey respondents believe the pandemic has affected competitive dynamics in their market by making consumers more likely to seek care at retail-based clinics.
HENRY KOTULA 