Is the Community Hospital a Dying Model, or is it the Future of Healthcare?
Written by Sabrina Rodak | May 30, 2012
As the healthcare industry adopts the philosophy of accountable care, large hospitals and academic medical centers may seem to have the upper hand compared with community hospitals, because larger hospitals typically have greater access to revenue and offer more services along the continuum of care. “Academic medical centers offer complex services that for a variety of reasons produce better availability of capital,” says Tim Bateman, executive director of the community hospital network Community Hospital 100 and executive vice president of Lincoln Healthcare Events. However, community hospitals may be able to develop new care models more effectively because they are smaller and closely aligned with the community. Here, several community hospital leaders discuss the biggest challenges they face and what they have to do to thrive in the new era of healthcare.
Advantages and disadvantages of community hospitals
While often seen as a disadvantage, community hospitals’ small size may be an advantage in the drive to reduce costs and improve quality. “The smaller your system is, the easier it is to redesign it,” says John Chessare, MD, president and CEO of Greater Baltimore Medical Center HealthCare, which includes a 300-bed community hospital. “The larger your system is, the harder it is to get standardized work in place. And then you have to [ask], is it really a system or just a confederation of units? There are a lot of hospital companies that call themselves a system, but in reality each hospital is operating independently from each other. A community hospital and its medical staff should be able to get to care that is coordinated through the eyes of the patient at a much faster pace than a large hospital company with loosely affiliated physicians.” Small, close-knit community health systems may thus be able to change from a fee-for-service care delivery model to a pay-for-performance system more quickly and easier.
On the other hand, one of the disadvantages of community hospitals is their relatively lower access to medical professionals, partly due to their size and location. “[Academic medical centers] have access to larger pools of qualified medical staff and professionals,” Mr. Bateman says.
