Get Ready for Healthcare Conglomerates

While not speaking about Fairview in particular, Towers Watson senior consultant David Hinkel says the key to making any such relationship with payers work requires solving problems first with the idea that the goal is to provide quality care for patients. With that in mind, everything else will follow.

“We talk about how hospitals have had a tough road in declining reimbursements and the uninsured, but healthcare reform is shining a bright light on hospital performance. They have to take a hard look at their business model and figure out how to be successful. There will be 33 million new insured, and anytime there’s an inflow of capital into a market space it will attract attention.”

“There’s always the broad issue of cultural changes,” he says, adding that being willing to think about different ways to deliver care in cooperation with the many nodes at which patients access the healthcare system is critical. There’s not any one way to do it. It is about getting data from payers. But mostly, it’s about executing by actively engaging the clinicians.

“Care teams really have to do this work and lead this work,” he says. “I can’t tell people how to do it.”

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