Advances in non-invasive surgeries, changes in health care financing and now increasingly price-sensitive patients accelerate what has been a 40-year decline in the number of patients spending the night in hospitals.
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.
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has signed a new kind of contract with the Franciscan Alliance hospital system that allows Franciscan to make more money only if it saves money for Anthem.
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.
The Indiana-based system that operates three hospitals in the Indianapolis area said it is trying to cut its expenses by as much as $500 million, or 20 percent.
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.
Most of Indianapolis’ major hospitals and physician practices will not be available through Anthem’s exchange plan, but instead will be working with a health plan run by Indianapolis-based MDwise Inc.
Franciscan St. Francis Health earned a $6.6 million bonus from the Medicare program for its success at keeping central Indiana patients out of the hospital and the emergency room. So the hospital system will expand its participation in so-called accountable care programs to all its Indiana territories.
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.
An initiative is matching tech entrepreneurs with hospital officials in the hope of solving health care problems.
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.
Hospital system’s health insurance unit has IT infrastructure that will allow physicians to participate in Medicare’s shared savings program.
Indiana University Health, as well as a partnership of Franciscan Alliance and American Health Network, have formed accountable care organizations that won the blessing of the federal Medicare Shared Savings program.
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.
Myth prevents policymakers from attacking real problem of distributing funding.
There is a mix of sadness, grief and anger in Beech Grove, as Franciscan Alliance moves the last of its inpatient and emergency operations from its nearly 100-year-old Beech Grove hospital to the new Franciscan St. Francis facility at Stop 11 Road and Emerson Avenue.
Physician liaisons are becoming key in recruiting efforts.
Franciscan St. Francis Health said its plans to build an emergency room and physician office building in Greenwood are on hold due to uncertainty over the effects of health care reform.
