Future of Healthcare: Consolidation, Partnerships, and New Management Challenges (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I think the whole structure of the industry is going to change in the next decade. We're clearly going to have to go to accountable care organizations, where one organization has the hospitals, the manpower, and the financing together. Right now we've got too often a situation in health care where we have win-lose situations. The insurance company wins at the expense of the hospital and the physicians, or the hospital wins at the expense of physicians. We can no longer do that. We're going to have to be managing to find populations. I think we're not only going to see consolidation, we're going to see a lot of closures also. We don't need 5,000 hospitals in this country. Over half the hospitals in the country are 100 beds or less. Many of those smaller hospitals are very inefficient. They can't provide the care. What we need are high-tech, really, emergency rooms almost in these communities. So it's going to be a very different management challenge. It's going to be a very different health care system a decade from now.

Speaker 2: I think the other thing you're going to find, too, is probably some more partnerships along the way, between academic medical centers, community centers, specialty centers, physician organizations, where it may not be pure consolidation or merger acquisition, but it will be a form of partnership for services and products that both people can win from and the community can win from as well.

Speaker 3: I think the other thing you'll see with the consolidation, another thing that happened in the 90s, a lot of hospitals got into the physician business, employed physicians, and many of them did not do a real good job with that and ended up spinning the physicians off. I think we're going to see another wave of that type of model where physicians are going to be employed by hospitals. I think hospitals have to develop the skill set to be able to do that and manage physicians differently. I was talking to someone the other day who said they work for an accounting valuation firm that there's 140 cardiology practices in their queue for valuation, practices that are looking to basically be valued and sold. So I think you're going to see a major change there, and that, once again, is going to be a different skill set for folks that are in the physician business who are going to scale it up and have it be much larger.