Polarity management: the key challenge for integrated health systems

Integrated health systems are confronted with numerous dilemmas that must be managed. Many of these dilemmas are an inherent part of the system's structure, given that multiple competing hospitals, medical groups, and (sometimes) health plans are often under one organizational roof. This article presents an analysis of these dilemmas--referred to in the management literature as polarities--as they are found in six integrated health systems in Illinois. The nine polarities that must be managed include (1) hospital systems that want to be organizations of physicians; (2) system expansion by growing the physician component; (3) system centralization and physician decentralization; (4) centripetal and centrifugal forces involving physicians; (5) system objectives and physician interests; (6) system centralization and hospital decentralization; (7) primary care physicians and specialists; (8) physician autonomy via collectivization; and (9) vertical and virtual integration. The article identifies some of the solutions to the polarities that have been enacted by systems. In general, executives and physicians in integrated health systems must attend to the processes of integration as much as or more than the structures of integration.