With an ongoing shortage of physicians, healthcare systems across the country are developing strategies to overcome staffing challenges, especially in essential hospital-based care areas such as Emergency Medicine and Hospitalist services. Most hospitals have found it necessary to partner with medical staffing companies to provide contract services or to cover staffing shortages with costly locum providers.
So, when CHS executives learned in mid-July that American Physician Partners (APP), one of its long-time third-party contract providers was going to cease its operations within a matter of days, there was no time to waste. The CHS team worked quickly to complete a transaction in which APP’s hospitalist and ED providers joined the CHS organization – without any interruption in services for ten affected hospitals.
It was no small task to move the employment of nearly 300 people and to ensure that physicians and other providers would have all of the support needed, including insurance coverage, legal assistance for those working under visa programs, and an operational team to ensure staffing and other day-to-day needs would be covered.
CHS Clinical Vice President of Hospital-based Programs and former APP Division President Dr. Daniel Crane believes the new in-house program will benefit both CHS and the impacted providers. “There has been some instability among companies like APP and others in the last few years,” he said. “CHS was able to pull together its resources – practically overnight – to ensure the staffing stability its hospitals required and a more stable practice experience the physicians needed from their employer. Instead of relying on a third-party provider to manage business processes, CHS affiliates will now manage everything from recruiting, credentialing, onboarding, professional liability insurance, revenue cycle management, managed care contracting, patient safety and quality support, and more,” he continued.
“I’m confident we’ll see greater synergies and collaboration between hospital operators and physicians, which in turn should drive better outcomes, value and satisfaction,” said Dr. Melissa Mekessa who joined CHS through the transaction.
While pleased with their ability to pull together such an important transaction so quickly and effectively, CHS leaders say their in-house staging model is not a one-size-fits-all approach to staffing coverage. “We will continue to work with other provider organizations for these services,” said CHS Senior Vice President of Clinical Operations Miguel Benet, MD “But having an in-house program when necessary provides us with greater stability and flexibility for our markets and health systems. Being nimble gives us a new perspective about managing these medicine programs and prepares us for other instabilities should they occur. This kind of balanced approach to in-sourcing versus out-sourcing is effective, desirable and mutually beneficial.”