Chicago Hospital News – Physician Acquisition

By Lucy Zielinski (Vice President) Health Directions, LLC and Marcie Stern

As hospitals and health systems prepare themselves for healthcare reform, they are considering many new physician  strategies. Options include offering physicians a subsidized EHR, assisting practices with recruitment, providing access to health information exchange, and acquiring physician practices. This article addresses the last strategy: practice acquisition and physician employment. To make a physician acquisition strategy work, hospital leaders need to carefully manage three critical key success factors:

People
As any Fortune 500 corporation that has acquired a smaller company or competitor can attest to, one of the most critical, and  often overlooked, success factors is effective transition of people. Not only are financial and business systems merging, so too are the cultures and mindsets of the  people running the business...