Tag: Healthcare Reform

How to Reward Value Instead of Volume

Who has heard the favorite healthcare reform saying these days? “We need to reward providers for value, not volume!” It has almost become cliche. And conventional wisdom would teach that something touted frequently would be well thought through by the people touting it; but we all know conventional wisdom is often wrong. (Did I just say that the knowledge that conventional wisdom is often wrong is conventional wisdom?) I admit that I have not read everything by everyone doing the touting, but I’ve never heard anyone break down exactly how we can reward value instead of volume. So I’ll tell you.

There are only two ways to do it: a dumb way and a smart way. But first, let’s review how a healthcare provider makes money:

Revenue = Price x Quantity

Do you see that there are only two components (that we can control, at least) that determine how much money a company makes? We can change the prices we pay them or the quantity they sell.

Now, let’s suppose we are able to identify an objectively highest value healthcare provider out there. Let’s further suppose that we want to reward this high-value health system for its amazingly high value so that it can be financially rewarded for being so awesome and so (we hope) others will copy them to have high value and be rewarded, too. How can we do it? Let’s look at our two options:

Increase price: You’ll recognize this as what Medicare is trying to do. Will it have the intended effect? Probably. High-value providers will be rewarded with higher prices. But hold the phone–isn’t our true intended effect to get society the highest-value healthcare we possibly can? So how are we maximizing value if we’re raising prices? Raising prices lowers value. So we’re identifying the highest-value providers and then lowering their value. Hm. Ah, but maybe there will be an overall aggregate effect of higher value because we won’t raise prices much, but we’ll get lots of low-value providers to improve their quality. I guess. But all this seems to be doing is increasing the total money we pay on healthcare, which is not a good idea right now. So I call this the dumb approach. But people haven’t thought hard enough to know there’s also a smart approach . . .

Increase quantity: What this means is getting more people to the highest-value providers, so now we’re rewarding value with volume. Their hospital beds are full, their specialists are performing lots of high-margin surgeries, etc., and they are rewarded handsomely for being high value. Not only does this reward the high-value provider, but look what happens to patients–they get to have higher-value care because they’re going to the high-value providers! In other words, society collectively will be receiving higher-value healthcare. And the low-value competition, meanwhile, will not be so busy anymore, they’ll start to lose money, and they might actually go out of business UNLESS they improve their value as well. That’s quite an incentive to change (probably the most powerful one, actually).

So why aren’t we doing this rewarding value with volume thing? I could list a bunch of reasons why we’re not, but that wouldn’t be very clear thinking now, would it? Instead, I’ll ask this: Who is deciding which providers patients will go to? Whoever is making that provider selection (sometimes it’s the insurer or employer, sometimes it’s other providers, usually it’s the patients themselves) needs to (1) have the price and quality information necessary and be able to determine which provider they think is the highest value and (2) bear the financial consequences of their choice (otherwise they’ll just choose the highest quality every time without regard for price!). If the provider-selecting party can meet both of those conditions, they will be making what I call value-sensitive provider selections.

In summary, policy ideas to reward value with higher prices will not do much for aggregate healthcare value our society is purchasing. But policy ideas that can get those 2 conditions fulfilled for the parties making the provider selections will successfully reward value with volume and concomitantly provide low-value providers with an ultimatum to either improve value or go out of business.

So the questions we should be asking ourselves if we want to “reward providers for value, not volume” is How can we remove the barriers to value-sensitive provider selection?” When will I write another post that enumerates all of the most salient barriers and how to remove them? Ask me tomorrow, but not today.

Customers Determine the Financial Incentives

Image source: http://www.aldarin-electronics.com

This is one of the great non-understood truths about how industries work: (see title). [Brief pause to let the words sink in.] Let me illustrate:

I was at the 2012 Healthcare Conference at Harvard Business School and heard H. Lawrence (Larry?) Culp, the President and CEO of Danaher Corporation, speak. Danaher Corporation, just so you know, is one of the big suppliers to the healthcare industry. It’s the parent company for a ton of brands that make really sciency devices and diagnostic stuff. And now that I’ve slaughtered the description of the company. . . . So, Mr. Culp spoke about how profitable they are and how successful they are and whatnot, and then he opened it up for questions at the end.

Now, before I tell you what I asked him, you should know that I’ve always believed, based on what I learned in my business strategy education, that if we could fix the financial incentives in the healthcare system itself, the suppliers to the healthcare system will have their incentives fixed for them as well. So, if doctors all of a sudden start making tons of money by providing really high-value care for patients, but the big thing limiting them from improving their value by decreasing their prices even more is the cost of MRI machines and diagnostic tests, I’ve thought that the makers of those MRIs and diagnostic tests would see that, if they want to kill their competition, all they’d have to do is find a way to make much cheaper stuff to sell to the doctors, and the doctors would jump all over it. But, before the suppliers will invest money into developing those cheaper MRIs and diagnostic tests, they have to know that the doctors really want and will preferentially purchase cheaper stuff that still gets the job done.

So, with that background, I asked my question to Mr. Culp: “I see your company as a supplier of devices and diagnostics to the healthcare industry; in other words, you are providing a lot of the innovation to the industry. This is awesome, because it will help me do so much more for my future patients. But the discussion about how innovation is the main thing driving unsustainable health spending has become more and more important lately, so I’m just wondering, does that conversation affects how you choose to focus your R&D money by pushing you to start developing more cost-lowering innovations, or are R&D investments just determined by what customers are requesting?”

He gave a very professional and politically correct answer, and this is what it boiled down to: We’re a company, and just like every other successful company in this country, we’re trying to make money by making what customers will buy. As soon as customers start demanding cheaper devices and diagnostics, we’ll “pivot” our R&D investments toward those. (Yes, he actually used the word “pivot,” and it was very articulate of him.)

What’s the message in all of this? Customers determine the financial incentives.

Pop quiz: If everyone thinks MRIs are remaining unnecessarily expensive, how should we fix it?

  • A: Tell the MRI makers that they’re not providing high value machines, and then regulate them into developing cheaper technology
  • B: Realize that they’re not investing in developing cheaper MRIs because customers aren’t demanding cheaper MRIs, so figure out why customers aren’t demanding cheaper MRIs and solve that problem

I hope you chose the second option. Now apply this to what we’re seeing with all these regulations to try to fix the value provided by doctors and hospitals. Shouldn’t we be looking at the doctors’ and hospitals’ customers and fixing whatever is keeping them from choosing high-value doctors? The regulations will likely help, but they’re not going to be a sustainable solution to our providers’ value problem. We need to understand and fix whatever’s going on with their customers (ahem, patients and insurers). Oh, insurers aren’t providing the highest value insurance they could provide? Why could that be?

Parting thoughts:

In the medical devices/diagnostics-provider relationship, the provider is the customer. But in the insurer-provider relationship, the provider is the supplier. Remember, there is a whole chain of customer-supplier relationships in every industry, so this means if we want to fix the financial incentives in the healthcare system, we have to go all the way back to the very beginning customer in the chain and fix what they’re doing, which will then fix what the next party in the chain is doing, which will then fix what the next party in the chain is doing, . . .

What the Government Should Do to Help Flailing Industries

I recently reread two really good pieces on different roles the government should take in helping flailing industries. One was the last chapter of Clay Christensen et al.’s The Innovator’s Prescription, and the other was Atul Gawande’s Testing, Testing. Plus, I have my own addition. (Bear in mind, this all relates to established industries, so I won’t mention the additional subsidizing roles the government could take in helping the foundation of industries.)

Christensen et al. tell multiple stories that are all pretty similar to each other, but here’s a typical one: the government sees that mainframe computers are really expensive and that IBM has a near monopoly on them, so, using the “increase competition, lower prices” dogma, it spends tons of money trying to break up IBM. Meanwhile, new innovative companies come along and meet the same computing needs of consumers with way cheaper micro-processor-based computers, lowering prices for computing way more than competition amongst a bunch of broken up IBM competitors could ever have. Moral of the story #1: instead of worrying so much about monopolies and other limitations on sustaining competition, the government should be more focused on identifying and eliminating regulatory barriers to disruptive innovators. This is when you should think about barriers such as against the building of specialty hospitals, certain prescription-writing privileges for physician extenders, and the licensing of dental health aide therapists for serving rural areas.

Gawande talks about the agricultural industry and how it was revolutionized into a much more efficient industry through a government program (that started out as just another pilot program) that eventually placed government-employed farming consultants in nearly every county. The role of the consultants was to continually provide to the local farmers information about the state-of-the-art methods for growing the best and most abundant crops. For some reason, the invisible hand of competition wasn’t enough to convince farmers to use new farming techniques. Moral of the story #2: if competitors don’t have access to information that can help them improve value, or if the implementation of such information is above their ability/willingness to try, the government can help information flow and help competitors implement that information, possibly by providing subsidies that take away the downside risk of implementation or by teaching how others are doing it.

And here’s my addition: before we can start worrying about removing regulatory barriers or helping information flow and implementation, we need to remember that the goal of all this is to improve the value of the industry, and then we need to make sure financial incentives are aligned with what we value. What I mean is, without the financial incentives to develop a cheaper version of a mainframe computer, it would have taken a lot longer to come about; without the financial incentives for farmers to use new techniques to grow and sell more crops, they would have been even more hesitant to try the new ideas out. Moral of the story #3: until financial incentives are aligned with value, anything else the government does to try to help low-value industries improve (including the first two morals of the stories) will be severely limited in efficacy. I can’t think of another privatized industry in history where financial incentives haven’t been aligned with value, so I think this point isn’t as obvious to people.

Is this list exhaustive? Honestly, I don’t know. I guess the question I need to be able to answer is, Are there other causes of competition failing? I can’t think of any others, but I’m not enough of a markets historian.

Also, this post obviously doesn’t explain exactly why I think financial incentives aren’t aligned with value in healthcare, but that’s what I’ve spent the last month writing a perspective article about (thus, the long time since my last post), and the ideas will make it to my blog hopefully soon.

How to Make the Cost of Care Cheaper

I’ve been leading up to this for a long time. Lowering the cost of the actual provision of care is one of the most important things all countries with unsustainable health spending growth need. And, at the outset, I’ll say I don’t have all the answers. But here’s what I’ve got, explained in maybe a roundabout way, but hopefully it makes sense by the end.

Think about providers’ incentive to innovate. Do they have one? Hopefully your initial response is “yes,” because you’d be right (partially). Assuming this is a provider that operates as most in the country do, its prices are determined based on market power, not costs. So, with the assurance that prices will stay the same regardless of costs, providers have a great incentive to lower costs! Any cost decrease will go straight to their bottom line.

At this point, I picture in my head a little map of the United States with a vertical pin sticking out of it for each hospital, with the height of the pin representing that hospital’s costs of delivering care. The taller the pin, the higher the costs. So, the incentive for each hospital is to lower their costs as much as possible in order to maximize profits, and different hospitals succeed to varying degrees. The pins get pushed down with each successful cost-cutting initiative, some more than others.

Now let’s say there is a hospital that finds a really innovative way to deliver care, and their costs are way lower than everyone else’s. They want to get more customers in an effort to continue generating more wealth, but they’re stuck! Why are they stuck? Because even though their costs are so much lower, they don’t really get to set the prices the patients actually pay when choosing which hospital to go to for care. High-value providers can’t expand to new cities because they’d have to set their prices lower than existing providers’ prices, steal a whole bunch of the market share, and most likely force some of the lower-value incumbents out of business. But if they could, do you see what would happen to the pins? The one really low pin would start spreading, making the tallest pins get taken off the map completely with each market that it spreads to. It would be beautiful! Different kinds of cost-saving innovations would be spreading all over the country.

So, to repeat David Cutler’s question, Where are all the healthcare innovators? They’re out there, all over the country, but they’re stuck in their current markets; thus, we don’t see or even hear about most of them.

In summary, think of the two ways a company can make more money:

  1. Sell items at a higher margin
  2. Sell more items

Providers in our healthcare system can only do the first one. The second one is mostly not functioning, and thus we don’t have the harsh (and absolutely crucial) evolutionary force of putting lower-value providers out of business and lowering the cost of healthcare.

I’ll admit, the proliferation of high-deductible plans and new kinds of deals between providers and insurers are starting to overcome this. But there are probably other ways to increase the pace of the elimination of these barriers, and I would think the government should be focused on figuring out what they are if they want to solve this country’s budget problems. Or they could continue to argue over how to how to reduce volume and price while largely ignoring costs.

How to Think About a Healthcare Reform’s Impact on Total Spending

I know I left off my last post with a cliff-hanger about how to lower the cost of delivering care, but I realized I’m explaining this in an out-of-order way, so I’m going to back up a bit and lay the foundation.

I’ve posted before that there are actually three ways to lower health spending. Again, here’s the equation:

Total Spending = Volume x Price

To lower total spending, we could lower volume or lower price. And, again, we can only lower price so much without actually lowering costs of delivering care.

But what about the third way? A more complete equation would look like this:

Total Spending = Volumea x Pricea + Volumeb x Priceb + Volumec x Pricec + . . .

Get it? Our total spending is the total amount we’ve spent on hip replacements and on metformin and on office visits. . . .

So, the third way for us to lower total spending would be to adjust our mix of services so we’re choosing low-cost treatments instead of high-cost ones. Instead of buying brand-name drugs, we’d buy generics. Instead of full knee replacements, we’d opt for physical therapy.

Okay, good. Now, whenever you hear anything about a reform that’s aimed at lowering total health spending, you should be able to easily place it into one of those three categories.

So what about the Affordable Care Act? There are a zillion different provisions, all with different effects on total spending. Increasing insurance coverage = increased volume. Requiring preventive care coverage = changing services mix (more preventive services, fewer preventable complications we have to fix). Insurance exchanges = lower price through increased price competition among insurers. . . . To mention just a few.

(The Framing of) How to Solve the Healthcare Cost Problem

“The cost problem” in healthcare is referring to the fact that our country is making itself go bankrupt based on overspending on healthcare, and we’re not even getting amazing outcomes that justify that spending. I’ve blogged before about how this overspending problem can really be broken down into two separate problems:

Spending = Volume x Price

To really get a good solution, we need to both (1) lower the volume of care delivered and (2) lower the prices we’re paying for everything. Lowering the volume, I’ve already argued, would substantially be achieved by giving providers an incentive to profit from long-term wellness. People at Dartmouth say 30% of all care is unnecessary, so, if true, that would mean big savings. But I’ve never said much about how to lower price, so let’s talk about price now:

Price = Cost + Profit

If we want to substantially lower prices, we need to actually lower costs, and then make sure prices follow them down. What I’m saying is that any price-lowering reform needs two components:

  1. Costs to go down
  2. Prices to follow

We’ve actually seen people try to only lower costs (think: tort reform) and other people try to only lower prices (think: all-payer rate setting).

I’ve also explained before that we should expect providers to be the main drivers of cost-lowering innovations. But provider-driven, cost-lowering innovations don’t seem to be happening much in our (or anyone’s!) healthcare system, so why not? The answer to this question is what every health system in the world needs. So I’ll tell you. Next time.

The Only Two Ways to Reduce Healthcare Spending

If you’ve graduated from elementary school, you have probably learned this formula:

Money Spent = Number of Units * Price per Unit

If we’re talking healthcare (and we are), the “Money Spent” part would be the approximately 18 percent of our GDP that goes to healthcare. The number of units would be the number of doctor visits, ER visits, x-rays, cardiac catheterizations, pills, MRIs, etc. that we buy each year. And the price per unit would be the actual cost of the provision of care plus some amount of profit.

So, if we are to solve our healthcare spending crisis, we need to either reduce the number of units we buy or the price per unit. Those are the only two ways.

It’s been interesting lately as I read/hear about healthcare reform ideas with this in mind. I’m not sure any of them have actually proposed something that will directly reduce the actual cost of the provision of care, which, in my mind, is what we need to be worrying about. Think about it: We can reduce the number of units by doing more preventive care and rationing; we can reduce healthcare organizations’ profits by having the government set prices lower; but healthcare will still cost a lot of money! The real money-saving potential lies in reducing the actual cost of the provision of care.

Is that possible? YES.

How? Evolution of the healthcare industry through better information, business model innovation, and technology. (See The Innovator’s Prescription by Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang, which doesn’t have all the answers, and the ones provided are disputed, but I think they’re on the right track.)

How to Keep Insurance Companies from Stealing Healthcare Cost Savings

In February 2011, I posted on what healthcare delivery reform proposals are getting wrong. Here’s the brief rundown on what I explained:

  • Most reform proposals will make care less expensive for patients (due to more integrated care plans, a better focus on preventive care, fewer complications, etc.)
  • Providers are the ones charged with making these delivery changes
  • Patients saving money = providers getting paid less
  • Why would providers make the changes only to lose money? They somehow need to financially benefit from their efforts and improvements
Are there solutions to this? Of course! Here are my favorite two:

 

First, integrated delivery. If the organization charged with making changes to how care is delivered is the same that will benefit financially, it works. An example might help. I live in Utah, where Intermountain Health Care (IHC) dominates. IHC is really good about doing research and finding ways to improve quality. So let’s pretend they do a lot of heart valve replacements, and that they’re usually paid $20,000. But, if they have a complication, they have to do all sorts of extra work, and they end up getting paid $30,000. (I’m making the numbers up, but I’m not lying about the fact that providers often get paid more for procedures when there were complications.) So, IHC finds that they can tilt the bed at a 20-degree angle and that magically reduces complications by 25%. But that means they’re getting paid $10,000 less every time they avoid that complication! The patient whose complication was averted with the tilting of the bed maybe ends up paying $2,000 less in co-pays than he would have, and the insurance company saves the other $8,000.

 

Poor IHC, right? They spent thousands of dollars on the research that produced the bed-tilting idea, and now the patients’ and insurance companies’ wallets are benefitting. Except, IHC has a secret. The insurance that patient was on is Select Health, which is IHC-owned! So, really, IHC just saved its patient $2,000 and saved itself $8,000. Not bad! This scenario, when the provider and insurer are the same entity, is called “integrated delivery,” and it creates excellent incentives to improve quality. The only time this breaks down is when IHC averts all sorts of complications for patients on different insurance companies. [Update: There are downsides to integrated delivery organizations, including ACOs, that relate to their limiting of the options available to patients and, thus, interfere with value-sensitive decisions. I won’t explain it here, but I’ve learned more since writing this post.]

 

This brings me to the second solution, which can sometimes work when it’s not an integrated delivery situation. So when IHC goes to renegotiate their contract with, say, Altius, they will have their reduced-complication-rates data in hand, and they will say, “Hey, we have 25% fewer complications than before, so your average cost will go down from $22,500 to $21,000. But we want some of those savings since you didn’t do anything to warrant saving all that money, so we’ll raise your rates a little bit to make your average cost $22,000, which is still lower than it was before, and we’ll be getting some compensation for all this hard quality-improvement work we’ve been doing.” I guess this solution could be called “splitting the savings.” [Update: Since writing this, an amazing idea called “shared savings” became popular. It’s exactly what I describe above. But it has a pithier name.]

 

The providers will still be losing some of the savings to the patients and external insurance companies, but at least they’re improving quality and their reputation!

Why Doesn’t the Healthcare Industry Evolve Like Other Industries?

If you think about almost any industry and how it changes over time, you can see an obvious shift from high cost, low quality to lower cost, higher quality (and, thus, greater access to the product/service). Think about computers, or portable music players, or cars, or flat-screen TVs, or indoor plumbing, or airline flights. . . .

Average yearly productivity growth of industries is estimated to be about 2.4%. But healthcare is different–it receives negative estimates year after year. So what’s the cause of this? Why doesn’t healthcare evolve toward higher productivity over time? If we can figure this out, then maybe we’ll know what we should work on changing with how the industry is structured. And then we’ll be able to permanently solve this crazy trend of healthcare spending, which has been increasing at a rate of 2 – 4% faster than the rest of our economy for a long, long time.

People often blame the lack of evolution (toward lower cost, at least) on healthcare providers not having an incentive to compete on price. Patients don’t price shop, so why would they compete on price? And patients don’t price shop because insurance just covers everything for them, even the small, routine things.  We’re all contributing to this because, no matter which doctor we choose, we still have a $15 co-pay, so why would we waste our time finding out which provider will send the cheapest bill to our insurer? It’s reasonable, this argument, which says that the insurance structure is the reason healthcare providers don’t have to compete on price, and that that is causing the industry not to evolve like it should.

Are there any solutions to this?

The most commonly proposed solution is high-deductible insurance plans. It makes sense. If nothing is covered until you surpass a $1,000 or $2,000 or $5,000 deductible, price starts to really matter unless you’ve already surpassed that deductible for the year (which would be unusual for healthy people). The hard part about this is actually being able to find out prices from providers, but we’ll ignore that with the assumption that if enough people start requesting prices, providers will start making them more readily available. So the result would be that providers finally have to compete on price, they now have an incentive to find ways to reduce prices, and problem solved!

Not so fast.

Did anyone ever consider that providers already do compete on price? No, they don’t compete on prices for patients, but they do compete on price to win insurance contracts. How do you think insurance companies choose which doctors will be in their network? By price! Yes, providers definitely compete on price already. They do it to win insurance contracts, which then guarantees them a steady flow of patients and revenue.

But why doesn’t price competition for insurer contracts provide enough of an incentive for providers to find ways to cut costs and help the healthcare industry to evolve like almost every other industry?

I don’t know. But here’s my guess:

Management is in charge of negotiations to win insurance contracts, so they feel the pressure to find ways to lower costs, but that pressure isn’t conveyed strongly down to the people who have the knowledge required to actually recommend cost-cutting changes: doctors and nurses. If management isn’t working with the current business model’s routines and processes day in and day out, they aren’t going to see the inefficiencies in how things run. Doctors and nurses need to do that, so maybe most healthcare organizations aren’t giving doctors and nurses enough/any incentives to do that.

But, management’s specialty is figuring out completely new processes, routines, and business models that can achieve the same job for the patient but at a way lower cost. So why aren’t healthcare management people figuring out and experimenting with those in an effort to secure more insurance contracts (and, thus, market share and higher profitability)? You’d think the price competition for insurance contracts would at least motivate those kinds of experiments.

The answer may lie in the fact that healthcare provider organizations are known as some of the most complex organizations conceived by man. Possibly this complexity deters innovations like that. They’d be so hard to predict financial outcomes and market response! And with fewer ideas being tested, the evolution of healthcare will necessarily be slower than most industries. I’d love to see some research comparing the complexity of organizations with their speed of productivity growth. And I’m also interested to see the results of all sorts of government-funded “pilot programs” that allow providers to test new ideas out.

So, those are my conjectures, that price competition for insurance contracts isn’t enough because doctors and nurses aren’t given enough incentives to root out inefficiencies and because healthcare organizations are so complex that they deter business model innovations. Maybe I’m way off. Ideas?

UPDATE: I’m wrong. Providers don’t compete on price to convince insurers to add them to their networks. I’ve since learned that prices between insurers and providers are pretty much decided by Medicare prices as an anchor and adjusted up or down depending on bargaining power. This means prices will stay the same even if providers find lower-cost ways to deliver care. So, the question remains: Why aren’t providers finding all sorts of ways to lower costs if any cost reduction would not be followed by price reductions and, therefore, go straight to their bottom line? I still haven’t figured this one out, but Clay Christensen seems to think providers need to encompass the whole value chain to be successful at it, so maybe that has something to do with it.

What Healthcare Delivery Reform Proposals Are Getting Wrong

Let’s pretend I own a primary care clinic. There are quite a few doctors who work in my clinic (primary-care and specialists), and everything’s going great–we have plenty of patients, have a good reputation in the area, and are fairly profitable.

And then I am told I have to start doing this “patient-centered medical home” thing, which means I will now be responsible for all aspects of my patients’ care plans. If my patients go to other doctors, I need someone to talk to those outside physicians and find out what they did. I need to have someone available to answer questions and solve problems at all hours of the day and night so my patients will have continual guidance on how to make good decisions if something goes wrong. I need to hire a “care manager” to keep a close eye on all my high-maintenance patients (e.g., ones with multiple chronic diseases or social disabilities), calling them to make sure they’re taking their medications, teaching them how to follow their care plan the best, and all sorts of babysitting-type things like that. I also need to invest in a more comprehensive electronic health record system so I can keep track of all of this stuff. And I should probably also periodically pay someone to perform a data analysis on how efficiently the doctors in my clinic are performing so that I can find ways to further improve patient health and reduce the cost to my patients. And, as an incentive for my physicians to go along with all of this, I should probably find a way to adjust compensation to reward them for improving their patients’ health and lowering costs. . . . You get the picture.

So now I, the clinic manager, am faced with a choice: turn my clinic into a medical home OR just leave things the way they are.

In evaluating the first choice, I think about the upsides. Most of my patients will be healthier and better taken care of. Maybe even my physicians will have greater job satisfaction, which leads to increased productivity and lower turnover.

And then I think about the downsides. I will expend a lot of energy and money doing all of those things. I stand to lose profits from those increased costs and because my doctors will probably be performing fewer high-profit procedures. This loss of profit might be mitigated by the fact that my physicians will now have more time to take on additional patients, but that assumes I will be able to strengthen my reputation so much that I can steal market share from local competitors.

In summary, I figure the main upside is that my patients will be healthier, and the main downside is that it will generate a net loss in revenue. As high-minded as I am, I am not willing to risk my business’ very viability to potentially improve my patients’ health by implementing this medical home thing, so I choose to leave things the way they are.

Now, step out of the clinic manager perspective and analyze this with me for a second. This whole conversation begs the question: If medical-home patients’ care is so much less expensive (because of fewer procedures, ER visits, and the like), who is getting all of those savings? It’s obviously not the clinic (who, interestingly, is the one being asked to make the effort to change and assume all the attendant financial risk). Have you figured it out? It’s the payer! So patients and insurance companies will reap all the benefits, while the provider will take all the risks, make all the effort, and sacrifice profitability.

If any delivery reform proposal (e.g., ACOs, medical homes, etc.) is to be widely accepted by providers, that reform idea must include a way for the providers to reap some of the financial benefits. And that’s where many of these trendy reforms go wrong.