RFP is always a topic that gets people’s blood boiling. This post is not about debating RFP but trying to define it.
As I survey the PT landscape throughout the country, Physician Owned PT clinics (POPTS) is becoming a rather mature industry-it is abundant everywhere except the states where it has been mandated out of it. Attempts to eliminate it, slow its growth, and regulate it out of business have failed. Private PT’s are dealing with it in a number of fashions and unquestionably it has hurt business for private practices.
From what I have seen, the proverbial “cheese” has moved though in a much greater fashion and growth rate to the following scenarios:
Hospital WeAreTheAnswer is a large health care non for profit system comprised of a merger between a traditional Catholic and Jewish system. They have hospitals, freestanding surgical centers, imaging centers, labs, urgent cares, and medical office buildings. WeAreTheAnswer employs physicians in large numbers. These physicians include primary care and specialists including orthopedic surgeons. The orthopedists are paid a base salary and a bonus determined by their productivity based on MGMA data. The data includes the entire realm of the orthopedists contribution to WeAreTheAnswer including referral and performance for imaging, PT, lab, and surgery. Although the doc doesn’t get performance bonuses directly from PT per se, the physician does benefit.
Hospital SmallGuyTryingHard is a single hospital with all facilities located on a small campus including a medical office that employs physicians and even an orthopedist that they recruited. They control the physician’s practice by managing it including the directing of patients to their labs, PT practice, imaging, etc. Their “control” is uncanny-few patients leak out of their system.
Are WeAreTheAnswer and SmallGuyTryingHard referral for profit? Are the competing PT clinics just as disadvantaged as a POPTS? Are the PT employees of such system ever going to be in an “autonomous” situation as described in Vision 2020?
thoughts? help!!
