In the last edition of the Weekly Gist, we illustrated how non-hospital physician employment spiked during the pandemic. Diving deeper into the same report from consulting firm Avalere Health and the nonprofit Physicians Advocacy Institute, the graphic above looks at the specialties that currently have the greatest number of physicians employed by hospitals and corporate entities (which include insurers, private equity, and non-provider umbrella organizations), and those that remain the most independent.
To date, there has been little overlap in the fields most heavily targeted for employment by hospitals and corporate entities. Hospitals have largely employed doctors critical for key service lines, like cancer and cardiology, as well as hospitalists and other doctors central to day-to-day hospital operations.
In contrast, corporate entities have made the greatest strides in specialties with lucrative outpatient procedural business, like nephrology (dialysis) and orthopedics (ambulatory surgery), as well as specialties like allergy-immunology, that can bring profitable pharmaceutical revenue.
Meanwhile, only a few specialties remain majority independent. Historically independent fields like psychiatry and oral surgery saw the number of independent practitioners fall over 25 percent during the pandemic.
While hospitals will remain the dominant physician employer in the near term, corporate employment is growing unabated, as payers and investors, unrestrained by fair market value requirements, can offer top dollar prices to practices.
Running a health system recently has proven to be a very hard job. Mounting losses in the face of higher operating expenses, softer than expected volumes, deferred capex, and strained C-suite succession planning are just a few of the immediate issues with which CEOs and boards must deal.
But frankly, none of those are the biggest strategic issue facing health systems. The biggest strategic issue is the reorganization of the American healthcare landscape into an ambulatory care business that emphasizes competing for covered lives at scale in lower cost and convenient settings of care. This shift in business model has significant ramifications, if you own and operate acute care hospitals.
Village MD and Optum are two of the organizations driving the business model shift. They are owned by large publicly traded companies (Walgreens and UnitedHealth Group, respectively). Both Optum and Village MD have had a string of announced major patient care acquisitions over the past few years, none of which is in the acute care space.
The future of American healthcare will likely be dominated by large well-organized and well-run multi-specialty physician groups with a very strong primary care component. These physician service companies will be payer agnostic and focused on value-based care, though will still be prepared to operate in markets where fee-for-service dominates. They will deliver highly coordinated care in lower cost settings than hospital outpatient departments. And these companies will be armed with tools and analytics that permit them to manage the care for populations of patients, in order to deliver both better health outcomes and lower costs.
At the same time this is happening, we are experiencing steady growth in Medicare Advantage. And along with it, a stream of primary care groups who operate purpose-built clinics to take full risk on Medicare Advantage populations. These companies include ChenMed, Cano Health and Oak Street, among others. These organizations use strong culture, training, and analytics to better manage care, significantly reduce utilization, and produce better health outcomes and lower costs.
Public and private equity capital are pouring into the non-acute care sectors, fueling this growth. As of the start of 2022, nearly three quarters of all physicians in the US were employed by either corporate entities (such as private equity, insurance companies, and pharmacy companies), or employed by health systems. And this employment trend has accelerated since the start of the pandemic. The corporate entities, rather than health systems, are driving this increasing trend. Corporate purchases of physician practices increased by 86% from 2019 to 2021.
What can health systems do? To succeed in the future, you must be the nexus of care for the covered lives in your community. But that does not mean the health system must own all the healthcare assets or employ all of the physicians. The health system can be the platform to convene these assets and services in the community. In some respects, it is similar to an Apple iPhone. They are the platform that convenes the apps. Some of those apps are developed and owned by Apple. But many more apps are developed by people outside of Apple, and the iPhone is simply the platform to provide access.
Creating this platform requires a change in mindset. And it requires capital. There are many opportunities for health systems to partner with outside capital providers, such as private equity, to position for the future – from both a capital and a mindset point of view.
The change in mindset, and the access to flexible capital, is necessary as the future becomes more and more about reorganizing into an ambulatory care business that emphasizes competing for covered lives at scale in lower cost and convenient settings of care.
Radio Advisory’s Rachel Woods sat down with Optum EVP Dr. Jim Bonnette to discuss the sustainability of modern-day hospitals and why scaling down might be the best strategy for a stable future.
Rachel Woods:When I talk about hospitals of the future, I think it’s very easy for folks to think about something that feels very futuristic, the Jetsons, Star Trek, pick your example here. But you have a very different take when it comes to the hospital, the future, and it’s one that’s perhaps a lot more streamlined than even the hospitals that we have today. Why is that your take?
Jim Bonnette: My concern about hospital future is that when people think about the technology side of it, they forget that there’s no technology that I can name that has lowered health care costs that’s been implemented in a hospital. Everything I can think of has increased costs and I don’t think that’s sustainable for the future.
And so looking at how hospitals have to function, I think the things that hospitals do that should no longer be in the hospital need to move out and they need to move out now. I think that there are a large number of procedures that could safely and easily be done in a lower cost setting, in an ASC for example, that is still done in hospitals because we still pay for them that way. I’m not sure that’s going to continue.
Woods: And to be honest, we’ve talked about that shift, I think about the outpatient shift. We’ve been talking about that for several years but you just said the change needs to happen now. Why is the impetus for this change very different today than maybe it was two, three, four, five years ago? Why is this change going to be frankly forced upon hospitals in the very near future, if not already?
Bonnette: Part of the explanation is regarding the issues that have been pushed regarding price transparency. So if employers can see the difference between the charges for an ASC and an HOPD department, which are often quite dramatic, they’re going to be looking to say to their brokers, “Well, what’s the network that involves ASCs and not hospitals?” And that data hasn’t been so easily available in the past, and I think economic times are different now.
We’re not in a hyper growth phase, we’re not where the economy’s performing super at the moment and if interest rates keep going up, things are going to slow down more. So I think employers are going to become more sensitized to prices that they haven’t been in the past. Regardless of the requirements under the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which require employers to know the costs, which they didn’t have to know before. They’re just going to more sensitive to price.
Woods: I completely agree with you by the way, that employers are a key catalyst here and we’ve certainly seen a few very active employers and some that are very passive and I too am interested to see what role they play or do they all take much more of an active role.
And I think some people would be surprised that it’s not necessarily consumers themselves that are the big catalyst for change on where they’re going to get care, how they want to receive care. It’s the employers that are going to be making those decisions as purchasers themselves.
Bonnette: I agree and they’re the ultimate payers. For most commercial insurance employers are the ultimate payers, not the insurance companies. And it’s a cost of care share for patients, but the majority of the money comes from the employers. So it’s basically cutting into their profits.
Woods: We are on the same page, but I’m going to be honest, I’m not sure that all of our listeners are right. We’re talking about why these changes could happen soon, but when I have conversations with folks, they still think about a future of a more consolidated hospital, a more outpatient focused practice is something that is coming but is still far enough in the future that there’s some time to prepare for.
I guess my question is what do you say to that pushback? And are there any inflection points that you’re watching for that would really need to hit for this kind of change to hit all hospitals, to be something that we see across the industry?
Bonnette: So when I look at hospitals in general, I don’t see them as much different than they were 20 years ago. We have talked about this movement for a long time, but hospitals are dragging their feet and realistically it’s because they still get paid the same way until we start thinking about how we pay differently or refuse to pay for certain kinds of things in a hospital setting, the inertia is such that they’re going to keep doing it.
Again, I think the push from employers and most likely the brokers are going to force this change sooner rather than later, but that’s still probably between three and five years because there’s so much inertia in health care.
On the other hand, we are hitting sort of an unsustainable phase of cost. The other thing that people don’t talk about very much that I think is important is there’s only so many dollars that are going to health care.
And if you look at the last 10 years, the growth in pharmaceutical spend has to eat into the dollars available for everybody else. So a pharmaceutical spend is growing much faster than anything else, the dollars are going to come out of somebody’s hide and then next logical target is the hospital.
Woods: And we talked last week about how slim hospital margins are, how many of them are actually negative. And what we didn’t mention that is top of mind for me after we just come out of this election is that there’s actually not a lot of appetite for the government to step in and shore up hospitals.
There’s a lot of feeling that they’ve done their due diligence, they stepped in when they needed to at the beginning of the Covid crisis and they shouldn’t need to again. That kind of savior is probably not their outside of very specific circumstances.
Bonnette: I agree. I think it’s highly unlikely that the government is going to step in to rescue hospitals. And part of that comes from the perception about pricing, which I’m sure Congress gets lots of complaints about the prices from hospitals.
And in addition, you’ll notice that the for-profit hospitals don’t have negative margins. They may not be quite as good as they were before, but they’re not negative, which tells me there’s an operational inefficiency in the not for-profit hospitals that doesn’t exist in the for-profits.
Woods: This is where I wanted to go next. So let’s say that a hospital, a health system decides the new path forward is to become smaller, to become cheaper, to become more streamlined, and to decide what specifically needs to happen in the hospital versus elsewhere in our organization.
Maybe I know where you’re going next, but do you have an example of an organization who has had this success already that we can learn from?
Bonnette: Not in the not-for-profit section, no. In the for-profits, yes, because they have already started moving into ambulatory surgery centers. So Tenet has a huge practice of ambulatory surgery centers. It generates high margins.
So, I used to run ambulatory surgery centers in a for-profit system. And so think about ASCs get paid half as much as a hospital for a procedure, and my margin on that business in those ASCs was 40% to 50%. Whereas in the hospital the margin was about 7% and so even though the total dollars were less, my margin was higher because it’s so much more efficient. And the for-profits already recognize this.
Woods: And I’m guessing you’re going to tell me you want to see not-for-profit hospitals make these moves too? Or is there a different move that they should be making?
Bonnette: No, I think they have to. I think there are things beyond just ASCs though, for example, medical patients who can be treated at home should not be in the hospital. Most not-for-profits lose money on every medical admission.
Now, when I worked for a for-profit, I didn’t lose money on every Medicare patient that was a medical patient. We had a 7% margin so it’s doable. Again, it’s efficiency of care delivery and it’s attention to detail, which sometimes in a not-for-profit friends, that just doesn’t happen.
Expenses are still weighing heavily on hospitals, health systems, and physician’s practices as the cost of care continues to rise.
Hospitals, health systems, and physician’s practices are still struggling under the weight of significant financial pressure, that the rise in patient volume and revenue can’t seem to outweigh.
The increase in patient volume and revenue has not been able to offset the historically high operating margins these organizations are facing, according to data from Kaufman Hall’s National Hospital Flash Report and Physician Flash Report. Hospitals, health systems, and physician’s practices dealt with negative margins in June for the sixth consecutive month this year.
“To say that 2022 has challenged healthcare providers is an understatement,” Erik Swanson, a senior vice president of data and analytics with Kaufman Hall, said in an email report. “It’s unlikely that hospitals and health systems can undo the damage caused by the COVID-19 waves of earlier this year, especially with material and labor costs at record highs this summer.”
The median Kaufman Hall year-to-date operating margin index for hospitals was -0.09% through June, for the sixth month of cumulative negative actual operating margins. However, the median change in operating margin in June was up 30.8% compared to May, but down 49.3% from June 2021.
Hospital revenues for June continued to trend upward, even as volumes evened out, according to the Kauffman Hall data. Organizations saw a 2.1% drop in patient length of stay. Both patient days and emergency department visits each dropped by 2.6% in June when compared to May. Hospital’s gross operating revenue was up 1.2% in June from May.
Expenses have been dragging down hospital margins for months, however, June saw a slight month-over-month improvement as total hospital expenses dropped 1.3%, despite this, year-over-year expenses are still up 7.5% from June 2021. Physician practices saw a drop in provider compensation, according to the Kaufman Hall data, however, this wasn’t enough to offset expenses. The competitive labor market for healthcare support staff resulted in a new high for total direct expense per provider FTE in Q2 2022 of $619,682—up 7% from the second quarter of 2021 and 12% from the second quarter of 2020.
“Given the trends in the data, physician practices need to focus on efficiency in the second half of 2022,” Matthew Bates, managing director and Physician Enterprise service line lead with Kaufman Hall, said in the email report. “Amid historically high expenses, shifting some services away from physicians to advanced practice providers like nurse practitioners or physician assistants could help rein in the costs of treating an increased patient load while taking some of the weight off the shoulders of physicians.”
A Pennsylvania physician accused of prescribing ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat and prevent COVID-19 has been terminated from Tower Health, PennLive reported Feb. 4.
Edith Behr, MD, is allegedly linked to Christine Mason, a woman who used a Facebook account to connect people to a physician for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin prescriptions. A social media user claimed Dr. Behr was the source of the prescriptions and reported her to authorities and her employer, according to PennLive.
West Reading, Pa.-based Tower Health officials became aware of the allegations against Dr. Behr Feb. 2 and took immediate action.
“Tower Health became aware yesterday of the allegations involving Dr. Edith Behr prescribing ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19,” Tower Health said in a Feb. 3 statement to PennLive. “We investigated the matter and, as a result, Dr. Behr’s employment with Tower Health Medical Group has been terminated effective immediately.”
Dr. Behr was a surgeon at Phoenixville (Pa.) Hospital, which is owned by Tower Health, according to the report.
Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have not been approved by the FDA for prevention or treatment of COVID-19.
Physicians employed by group practices owned by health systems are mostly paid based on the volume of care, despite recent insurance companies’ efforts to pay based on quality, a Jan. 28 Rand study published in Jama Health Forum found.
Seventy percent of practices follow a volume-based compensation plan, according to the analysis. For more than 80 percent of primary care physicians and more than 90 percent of physician specialists, volume-based compensation is the most common.
Although many health systems have financial incentives for quality and cost, only 9 percent of primary care providers and 5 percent of specialists have compensation based on those criteria.
“Despite growth in value-based programs and the need to improve value in healthcare, physician compensation arrangements in health systems do not currently emphasize value,” Rachel Reid, the study’s lead author and a physician policy researcher at Rand, a nonprofit research organization, said in a news release emailed to Becker’s. “The payment systems that are most often in place are designed to maximize health system revenue by incentivizing providers within the system to deliver more services.”
The study looked at physician payment structures for 31 physician organizations affiliated with 22 health systems across four states. The researchers interviewed leaders, examined compensation documents and surveyed physician practices.
The second year of the pandemic did not dampen UnitedHealth Group’s finances, and the company actually surpassed its initial 2021 revenue and profit projections, Bob writes.
The big picture: UnitedHealth’s revenue has tripled from 2010 to 2021, and profit has almost quadrupled. The company continues to make more of its money from owning doctor groups and controlling pharmacy benefits instead of relying on health insurance.
A top Medicare advisory board did not recommend any new payment hikes for acute care hospitals or doctors for 2023, stating that targeted relief funding has helped blunt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which makes recommendations to Congress and the federal government on Medicare issues, voted on the payment changes to Congress during its Thursday meeting. The panel decided against recommending any pay hikes.
The commission unanimously voted to update 2023 rates for acute care hospitals by the amounts determined under current law. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will publish its update to the current law payment rates this summer.
MedPAC estimated that the rates will increase 2% and that there would be 3.1% growth in hospital wages and benefits, but these “may be higher or lower by the time this is finalized,” said MedPAC staff member Alison Binkowski.
She added there will be another estimated 0.5% increase in inpatient rates.
MedPAC decided not to recommend any pay rates beyond current law after looking at the financial picture for hospitals and found the indicators of payment adequacy are generally positive.
“Hospitals maintained strong access to capital thanks to substantial federal support, including targeted federal relief funds to rural hospitals which raised their all-payer total margin to a near-record total high,” Binkowski said.
She added fewer hospitals closed, and facilities continued to have positive marginal Medicare profits.
It was also difficult to interpret changes in quality that traditionally would determine whether a payment boost would be needed.
“For example, mortality rates increased in 2020, but this reflects the tragic effects of the pandemic on the elderly rather than a change in the quality of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries or the adequacy of Medicare payments,” Binkowski said.
Even though commission members agreed with the recommendation for hospitals, they were concerned whether it was enough to help facilities meet drastic increases in labor expenses.
“With labor, it is more than just a salary increase these hospitals are seeing,” said commission member Brian DeBusk.
He noted that hospitals haven’t just seen an increase in rates for contract or temporary nurses, but in nursing education as well.
MedPAC also recommended no changes to the statutory payment update for dialysis facilities and shouldn’t give a payment update to ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) due to confidence in payment adequacy for the facilities.
“Despite the public health emergency, the number of ASCs increased by 2% in 2020,” said MedPAC staff member Daniel Zabinski. “The growth that we saw in the number of ASCs also suggests access to capital remains adequate.”
Physician fee schedule recommendation
The commission decided to take a similar estimate with the physician fee schedule, calling for any update to be tied to current law, which is estimated to have no change in spending.
Medicare payments to clinicians declined by $9 billion in 2020 but were offset thanks to congressional relief funds. Physicians also got a 4% bump to payments through 2022 compared to prior law.
The temporary rate hike is expected to go away at the start of 2023, but physician groups are likely to lobby Congress to keep the pay bump intact.
Physician groups already blasted the recommendation from MedPAC.
Anders Gilberg, senior vice president of government affairs for the Medical Group Management Association, tweeted that the recommendation was out of touch, especially after new reports of inflation.
“Hard to conceive of a more misguided recommendation to Congress at a time when practices face massive staffing shortages and skyrocketing expenses,” he tweeted.
We recently caught up with a health system chief clinical officer, who brought up some recent news about CVS. “I was really disappointed to hear that they’re going to start employing doctors,” he shared, referring to the company’s announcement earlier this month that it would begin to hire physicians to staff primary care practices in some stores. He said that as his system considered partnerships with payers and retailers, CVS stood out as less threatening compared to UnitedHealth Group and Humana, who both directly employ thousands of doctors: “Since they didn’t employ doctors, we saw CVS HealthHUBs as complementary access points, rather than directly competing for our patients.”
As CVS has integrated with Aetna, the company is aiming to expand its use of retail care sites to manage cost of care for beneficiaries. CEO Karen Lynch recently described plans to build a more expansive “super-clinic” platform targeted toward seniors, that will offer expanded diagnostics, chronic disease management, mental health and wellness, and a smaller retail footprint. The company hopes that these community-based care sites will boost Aetna’s Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment, and it sees primary care physicians as central to that strategy.
It’s not surprising that CVS has decided to get into the physician business, as its primary retail pharmacy competitors have already moved in that direction. Last month, Walgreens announced a $5.2B investment to take a majority stake in VillageMD, with an eye to opening of 1,000 “Village Medical at Walgreens” primary care practices over the next five years. And while Walmart’s rollout of its Walmart Health clinics has been slower than initially announced, its expanded clinics, led by primary care doctors and featuring an expanded service profile including mental health, vision and dental care, have been well received by consumers. In many ways employing doctors makes more sense for CVS, given that the company has looked to expand into more complex care management, including home dialysis, drug infusion and post-operative care. And unlike Walmart or Walgreens, CVS already bears risk for nearly 3M Aetna MA members—and can immediately capture the cost savings from care management and directing patients to lower-cost servicesin its stores.
But does this latest move make CVS a greater competitive threat to health systems and physician groups? In the war for talent, yes. Retailer and insurer expansion into primary care will surely amp up competition for primary care physicians, as it already has for nurse practitioners. Having its own primary care doctors may make CVS more effective in managing care costs, but the company’s ultimate strategy remains unchanged: use its retail primary care sites to keep MA beneficiaries out of the hospital and other high-cost care settings.
Partnerships with CVS and other retailers and insurers present an opportunity for health systems to increase access points and expand their risk portfolios. But it’s likely that these types of partnerships are time-limited. In a consumer-driven healthcare market, answering the question of “Whose patient is it?” will be increasingly difficult, as both parties look to build long-term loyalty with consumers.
HENRY KOTULA 