You were recently appointed full-time chairman of CoxHealth’s Joint Operations Committee. What is the role of JOC? The a committee is sort of a bridge between the physicians and the hospital side. That committee is responsible from taking in all the information from the two silos: the hospital operations side and the physicians’ side. They approve basically the issues and process changes that come out of subcommittees. There are several subcommittees that have to do with clinical patient care, the electronic record system, clinic operations, technology review, commercial contracting, all of those kinds of things.
This committee is specific to Cox, which has always been very physician driven. That’s very important. It is a committee that is made up of regional services physicians, which are employed in the physician arms at Cox, as well as physicians from the Ferrell-Duncan Clinic and administration. It’s a combination of those three arms within the hospital. The committee basically represents the interests of the physicians as well as the hospital operations.
Why is the physician’s voice important in hospital operations? It’s critical. Physicians are the ones in the trenches each day. They are dealing with how to deliver the care the most effective way. They are the ones who care about quality and the outcomes of their patients. Having physician input on this committee is vital because as a hospital, we can’t just think as administrators. Our administrators have their MBAs and are thinking along business lines. That’s important and you need that, too. As physicians, most of us aren’t MBAs. The melding of the two worlds is what’s important. We understand each others strengths and weaknesses. We know who brings what to the table. That’s critical to solving the types of changes that are occurring in health care.
Will you continue with your family practice? I’m cutting down to half time now. I’m at about two to three days a week and the rest is spent administratively. I’m not cutting back on patients, but I have been educating them as they come through about the changes and my access. Previously, we prided ourselves on getting patients in that day if they called. A physician assistant will see a lot of my overflow when I’m not available.
What are you goals as chairman? I’ve come into this position at a very transitional point in health care. There is tremendous movement in changing of reimbursement methodologies and how hospitals get paid. It’s an exciting time, but it’s also a bit of an unnerving time. We in health care are basically used to fee for service. When you get treated, we get paid. It’s a pretty simple process on the surface, however, those times are changing drastically. There are more at-risk contracts with payers. We are trying to lower costs through delivering less care at a higher quality.
What problems has JOC helped solve in the past? I was chairman of the commercial contracting subcommittee, which deals with the contract negotiations through various insurance companies. Therefore, it was a natural evolution to move into this position because we are seeing a drastic change in how hospital systems are being paid and care is being delivered.
The payment methodologies are changing so that we get paid for taking care of you better. You aren’t going to pay a co-payment every time you come in. There is going to be a fee that will be paid for a certain episode of care.
Say you have diabetes. Our job, as a health system, is to better use our resources to work together to lower the cost. If you are bouncing from your primary care doctor to specialists and each is ordering different things, you get a lot of overlap of services that drives up cost. All that does is hurt you. It doesn’t help us take care of you better. We are trying to combine this episode of care for you. We all need to be on the same page and have access to the same information. Then we can lower costs and improve quality of care.[[In-content Ad]]
