Positioning doctors for convenience medicine

Faced with an increasingly competitive environment, physicians must learn to organize themselves into group practices positioned to perform as the customer expects. To be successful, these new group practices must recruit the kind of physician who will meet the consumer's demands for quality care: convenience, continuity of care, and confidence in the doctor's competence. This article describes how doctors can become more competitive based on my observations as a former consultant with such healthcare companies as Cigna Healthplan, the largest for-profit HMO, and as the current vice president of Operations Planning and Development with Republic Health Corporation, a Dallas-based hospital management company. These observations should help hospital managers learn how to organize their medical staffs to better serve the patient's needs. By repositioning their physician services, hospitals should become better positioned to compete for new patients.