Beyond Collaboration

As my partner Doug Smith is fond of saying, the awakening period for hospitals is upon us. As a result, they are driving alignment of practices designed to provide improved care outcomes. They, too, are realizing they need to consolidate to take advantage of coordinated care relationships and the accompanying patient and service data, which they can then leverage for optimal performance in the new care and reimbursement paradigm.

This new state of awareness on the part of their hospital and health system partners portends monumental change for radiology group practices and service providers. As consolidation among their customers continues, the pressures brought to bear upon independent group practices to collaborate among themselves and their providers will be significant.

Collaboration alone, however, will not be sufficient to meet the emerging demands and expectations of health systems. To ensure sustainable, profitable independence, radiology practices must be able to continuously evidence their contribution to hospital care initiatives through collaborative, coordinated, broad, deep and demonstrable analytics.

In this issue of RadAnalytics, Doug provides his insight as to the ways in which radiology practices must position themselves to provide such information, making them true value-added partners to the delivery networks of the future.

Send comments to: bill.pickart@integratedmp.com.