orders from an insurance company or hospital bean-counter who wants them to save money on patient care, the attitude is different when the guy at the top of the company is a doctor/businessman. If nothing else, he knows what physicians are going through when they have to make tricky diagnoses or tough decisions on how to best treat a patient.
While much of this is about getting the culture right, there is a technology component, too. Sound Physicians has its own proprietary IT system that it developed to help hospitalist doctors keep track of every vital metric on a patient, including key stats they need to show customers, such as hospital length of stay times. Getting all the doctors fluent with this software is key, so that when one of them is off and another steps in to help a patient in need, there isn’t a lot of time wasted fumbling around through paper records or different programs that may or may not be compatible.
Some hospitals already embrace the hospital-centered concept, and don’t need to hire a firm like Sound Physicians to do it for them. Virginia Mason Medical Center, Swedish Medical Center, and the University of Washington all fall into that camp, says Sound Physicians’ vice president of marketing, Lynn Purdy.
On average, Sound Physicians says it can help hospitals improve their operating margins by about 2 to 5 percent, Purdy says. That might not sound like a lot, but it can add up to significant money in high-volume medical practices that generate a lot of revenue.
Like with any business, there are plenty of risks. Whenever Sound Physicians sets up in a new geography, it has to build good relationships with referring physicians, if it wants to get enough patient referrals to the hospitals where it practices. Malpractice allegations are par for the course. If word got around that it wasn’t a great place to work, or it had a few too many cowboys who don’t like to play well with others, then it could struggle to recruit and retain the young doctors it needs to make the whole system go.
The risks may be real, but they aren’t enough to outweigh the momentum in favor of hospitalist medicine, Bessler says. Doctors get frustrated in private practice when they can’t admit their patients in a timely fashion, and they often aren’t interested in driving a half hour to see one of their patients in the hospital, especially when they are likely to make a puny sum on reimbursement. Big hospitals and community health centers are constantly looking for ways to save money without sacrificing patient care. And despite all the growth Sound Physicians has seen, this is a trend that is still in its early days. There are about 4,800 acute care hospitals in the U.S., and Sound Physicians only serves about 45 of them now, meaning it has captured less than 1 percent of its potential market.
The way Sound Physicians can gain more ground, and the essential value proposition of its business, is about gathering excellent physicians around efficient technology and making them work through a better process for patient care, Bessler says. If all those things are aligned, then Sound Physicians ought to be able to deliver reproducible results from one patient to the next. For all the talk about genomics-driven personalized medicine, Sound Physicians has a vision of making patient care more consistent, efficient, and reliable than it already is.
“The human element is always there in medicine, and this isn’t manufacturing, but if you can borrow some best practices from other industries, you can get to reproducible outcomes,” Bessler says.
