Our hospital partners continue to experience tidal waves of financial challenges.
At TOC, we focus hard on balancing our four priorities:
- Playing an active role to partner with payers and employers on the need to reduce the overall cost of care
- Supporting our hospital partners as they try to navigate through increasing financial challenges
- Building new collaborations with our university partner with the aim on accelerating innovation via leading research as well as expanding medical education programs
- Maximizing the compensation of our physician partners
The market forces continue to push hard towards our top priority to reduce the overall cost of care. The development of the soon-to-open $15 million TOC Spine and Joint Replacement Surgery Center is the most recent example. Our payer and employer partners are beyond frustrated with the rapidly rising healthcare costs, and the new 17,000 square foot center is a "just in time must" for these purchasers. Our low cost initiatives also includes the expansion of imaging, orthotics and prosthetics, and physical therapy all under one comprehensive medical record. These are all key to value creation and growth.
As market forces continue to push hard to quickly reduce cost of care, the ability to help our hospital partners maintain a reasonable financial position is becoming more challenging. We are working hard to reinvent traditional hospital partnership models with new era models that more closely align with the changing market forces.
Florida State University is our long standing academic partner. We are thinking outside the box to help FSU transition to a new "FSU Health" era. The co-funding of a research scientist embedded within TOC physician clinics is aimed to accelerate innovation — together. In addition we are envisioning an orthopedic and sports medicine medical and graduate education center of excellence to ultimately become the new standard for training the world’s best orthopedic physicians. With universities being a vital economic engine to most communities, we are very excited for what comes next.
Maximizing physician partner compensation continues to receive headwinds with the broken Medicare Part B model that reflects constant cuts while the high cost Medicare Part A (hospitals) continues to fund increases. What is not reported — the current fund balances for Part A and Part B are at/near all time highs and indicate further physician cuts are not warranted. The time has come for a Medicare budget overhaul that invests in physicians to fund the resources to quickly drive down the overall cost of care. In addition, the private payers continue to avoid inflation updates for private physician practices while continuing to provide annual increases to hospitals — another model for immediate change.
In the meantime, our vision 2030 strategic plan is driving significant growth to outrun the obsolete reimbursement models and ongoing headwinds in healthcare.