Health systems and their associated contracted provider arrangements are beset with critical financial losses, and future economic change as elective care was virtually obliterated by the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic in the United States.
Approaching the situation through an established checklist may afford healthcare administrators an ability to step back and logically review options during this challenging and turbulent time.
In the wake of President Trump’s National Emergency information on March 13, 2020, multiple health experts and companies, including the Surgeon General of The United States, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), supported by more precise direction from the American College of Surgeons (ACS) confirmed that American hospitals cancel/postpone all “elective” medical procedures to focus resources on the crippling impact expected with COVID-19 spread.
Physician Compensation
In the days that ensued, many clinics and health practices projected adverse financial consequences totaling hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of ignoring or delaying high margin “elective” operations to be able to treat rare, complicated coronavirus sufferers enough.
Hospital-owned practitioner networks were also negatively affected by these actions. As the elected surgeries were, are, and will remain to be postponed, the expert services revenue compared with these cases is postponed – or lost altogether. Systems already besieged by negative edges are seeing the bottom fall out.
Within days after states began following Surgeon General and CDC guidance mandating that their clinics stop offering elective systems to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, HSG started to handle inquiries from consumers.
They were looking for direction on ways to deal with the physician payment ripple impact of the pandemic. Most companies with whom we talked were questioning if any of our other healthcare practices and hospital clients around the country had received a template or a scalable recipe that we could share, and that they could adopt or adapt for their business.
Regrettably, no one has a one-size-fits-all cheat sheet or magic wand for dealing with practitioner benefit issues that arise during these modern times. As is often the case with doctor coverage and contracting – each group and each situation is different.
COVID-19 Pandemic National Emergency
In response to consumer companies, HSG received a checklist to provide a rationale, best practice access to addressing physician compensation conditions created during this stressful, distracting and might COVID-19 pandemic national emergency. We hope that this proves to be a valuable tool for logically creating about and proactively determining how to check these circumstances best. Please note that the checklist estimate is not planned to be constant and does not reflect comprehensive prioritization. That said, transparent information with your doctors, and non-physician providers are paramount.
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