Hospital-physician relationships: imperative for clinical enterprise collaboration

The need for new venues for physician-hospital collaboration is significant and growing, especially between independent physicians and health systems. Often physicians and hospitals act independently of each other, even though maintaining and sustaining a productive relationship between physicians and hospitals is essential to good patient care and improving the health status of the communities we serve. The tension in physician-hospital relationships is a long-standing and widely acknowledged concern. The old model of hospital-physician relationships, governed by the rules of the organized medical staff structure, doesn't work in the current environment, which has grown increasingly complex as a result of economic, legal, and care-delivery changes. These complexities make relationship management challenging. Hospitals and physicians struggle to align behaviors to achieve cost and quality goals. The need has never been greater for hospitals and physicians to work together as a joint clinical enterprise to improve quality, reduce practice variation, and control the cost of healthcare. This article explores the challenges and some options for improving the physician-hospital relationship in the current environment.