Maximizing Physician-Hospital Alignment: Lessons Learned From Effective Models of Joint Arthroplasty Care

With recent healthcare reform efforts focusing on rewarding value instead of volume, it has become important for orthopedic surgeons to partner and align with their hospitals. We report our experience in aligning clinical and financial incentives with 6 health systems in our geographic area.

By managing the entire episode-of-care continuum for total hip and total knee arthroplasty patients, our standardized, evidence-based protocols have improved the quality of care for our joint arthroplasty patients. While most studies focus on cost through insurance claims data, we have been able to accurately determine the costs to our practice and each facility through time-driven activity-based costing.

We have also achieved measureable claims and actual cost reduction by reducing unnecessary care, inappropriate variation in care, and avoidable complications through demand matching, risk stratification, and our nurse navigator program. Our joint ventures with our hospital partners in both specialty hospitals and our ambulatory surgery centers have also been critical to our success.

Our experience demonstrates that large private practice groups can successfully align both clinical and financial incentives with healthcare systems to provide quality joint arthroplasty care at a lower cost.