Physician consolidation is accelerating across hospitals, payers and private equity groups, reshaping how and where physicians practice.
Three physicians recently joined Becker’s to discuss the mergers and acquisitions trends they find most concerning in the physician workforce.
Question: What is the most concerning merger/acquisition trend you’re seeing in the physician workforce right now?
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length:
Gregg Eure, MD. Urologist (Culpeper, Va.): It is becoming impossible to survive in private practice now. The answer is either merger, private equity or join a hospital system. I did the latter. Again, this is not the ideal path for medical care in the U.S.
Easwar Sundaram, MD. President of Texas Institute of Neurological Disorders (Dallas): It all comes to loss of the independent physician and patient care and trust. We are a business and [profit and loss] and top-line and bottom-line revenue analysis are the norm, and how well we take care of patients is secondary!
Tom McGue, MD. Chief Medical Officer at Newport (R.I.) Hospital: The elimination of services (obstetrics, emergency rooms, as examples) is a quick way to reduce costs following a merger/acquisition but may have long-term adverse effects on the success of an organization, and most concerning, could hurt patients who lose this access. I use obstetrics as an example of a lost service that could affect the allegiance of patients to an organization and may reduce their long-term use of the newly merged organization (that assumes that there are other choices available that the patients could switch to). Careful planning on how to afford patients access to other sources of these lost services needs to occur as part of the merger process. I am not sure this occurs in all circumstances, and this is a risk to patient well-being.
