Community Health Network and Eskenazi Health quietly called off their engagement months ago, when they found out federal laws effectively prohibited their marriage. Now they’re trying to figure out how to just be friends.
The Accountable Care Consortium was envisioned as a vehicle through which the hospitals would eventually funnel all of their roughly $2.5 billion in annual contracts with health insurers and employers.
Before local hospitals slashed staff and expenses last year, they had been boosting the pay packages of their top executives faster than hospitals around the country. Seven of every 10 senior executives at the major hospital systems in Indianapolis saw their total compensation rise more than 10 percent from 2010 to 2012.
Tom Fischer, the chief financial and chief operating officer of Community Health Network, departed suddenly this month. Sources with knowledge of the situation described Fischer’s exit as a firing. But a Community spokeswoman said Fischer resigned in a private meeting with Community CEO Bryan Mills.
For years, the county-owned hospitals ringing Indianapolis have watched warily as the city’s four major hospital systems used their superior size and resources to push ever outward into the suburbs.
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield President Rob Hillman expects a slow start to the Obamacare exchanges, with fewer than one-third of uninsured people buying coverage there.
Community Howard Regional Health said it will reduce its current workforce by 50 positions over the next few weeks.
Aggressive construction wiped out historical territories, thus opening the door to insurers playing hospitals off each other.
The recent flurry of big announcements portends well.
The sequestration plan kicking in Friday will chop Medicare payments to hospitals, doctors and nursing homes by 2 percent, beginning April 1. One study estimates that the cuts could result in 10,000-plus job losses in Indiana alone.
The new partnership between Community Health Network and Wishard Health Services could put a third health care entity in an awkward position: the Indiana University School of Medicine. Virtually all of the nearly 1,100 physicians who practice at Wishard Memorial Hospital and its community clinics come from the IU medical school.
Community Health Network’s new partnership with Wishard Health Services will create a primary-care behemoth that the systems argue will put them in the best position possible to handle the changes coming from federal health reform.
The partnership will create a new board to oversee and coordinate the operations of both systems, according to internal messages sent to Community stakeholders. Community Health CEO Bryan Mills will be the CEO of the new joint-operating entity.
The health care systems would not provide details, but said the announcement would place "Indianapolis in the best position for health care reform."
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has selected Community Health Network to be the “exclusive provider” for a new kind of health insurance plan—a sharp departure from Anthem’s typical strategy of offering the broadest network of hospitals and doctors.
In the era of health care reform, hospitals will face two new challenges: They will need to run higher-volume, lower-margin businesses, and they’ll be on the hook financially for what patients do even when they’re not receiving health care. Community Health Network’s new partnership with Walgreens’ Take Care Clinics is designed to help address both issues.
Community Health Network thinks it can help patients, engage doctors and maybe even make some money by trying to turn ideas within its organization into commercial products, service and companies.
Three area hospital groups—St. Vincent Health, Community Health Network and Suburban Health Organization—have agreed to join forces to manage patients’ health and strike new kinds of contracts with employers and health insurers.
A little extra Medicare money will flow to suburban hospitals in the Indianapolis area, based on recent patient satisfaction scores. But hospitals in the core of Indianapolis—and hospitals that do significant amounts of teaching medical students—may take a hit.
As St. Vincent Health has nearly doubled the number of physicians it employs over the past two years, the losses on those practices have mounted. And the same thing is happening at all the major Indianapolis hospital systems, as all have spent the past four years aggressively acquiring physician practices.
