Episode Details

Let's cut to the chase. You've gotten to the point where you have a gang of physicians/clinicians/physician practices who have expressed a desire to work together. What do you need to know right now?

Eric Gallagher, CEO of the Ochsner Health Network, is my guest in this healthcare podcast; and I largely asked him the same question that I had asked Amy Scanlan, MD, from the UCHealth/Intermountain clinically integrated network in Colorado in episode 402 a couple of weeks ago. The question I asked both Eric and Dr. Scanlan is: What are you doing to help align physician practices into an integrated model? How are you going about that?

Now, let me remind you, Ochsner Health Network is practically long in the tooth when it comes to clinically integrated networks; and it also exists in an environment that is unique, as are most local markets. But Ochsner's local market is mostly Louisiana, which has an older population and a huge Medicare Advantage penetration. That is quite a different local market from what's going on in Colorado, which is the location of Dr. Scanlan's joint. As we all know, different stages of any journey require different solution sets; and different local markets certainly require different solution sets.

But what was so interesting to me was to notice that despite the market differences and the where-are-we-in-the-transformation-journey differences, how many of the things that you'll hear about in this episode are in the same spirit as the stuff that we talked about in that earlier show with Dr. Scanlan.

Eric Gallagher lists three things that he says are essential in the transformation journey:

1. Making sure that physicians, care teams, and those working directly with patients are part of the transformation process, both from a practice standpoint but then also from a financial standpoint.

This makes so much sense when I state it explicitly here, but so frequently, it doesn't happen. So frequently there's a value-based care team that tinkers around in a silo and then an announcement comes over the loudspeaker one day that henceforth we shall add some more clicks … but trust us, it's important for some reason we aren't going to bother to tell you about … you'd be bored by it or you wouldn't understand it. Even if this was not the intention (and it probably wasn't), the result is going to be the bad taste in your mouth that I just left you with.

Eric Gallagher's #1 here, that everybody be part of the transformation, might be the umbrella really over the first thing that Dr. Scanlan talked about in that earlier episode, which was to make sure to give practices the tools that they need to succeed—not what you think they need but what you've discerned they actually need because you've listened to them. It's a bidirectional exchange here with everybody working together.

Eric adds some new ground to that. He says that to make sure that everybody can productively contribute to this transformation process (and probably know what tools they may need), it's vital that everybody understands the "why" behind what the organization needs to do, meaning educating physicians and other clinicians in the business of medicine and the financial reasons for the "why" with the whatever. Insulating docs from the real world here helps no one, and it's not really viable actually in the world that we live in today …

… which is a callback to the point that Denver Sallee, MD, made also in

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