I grew up in a small town. I went to a small college. And I live and practiced in a small town in a sparsely populated state. Clearly, I’m partial to smallness. I have practiced in a two-man partnership, a solo practice, a small group, and finally in a large multicenter organization. The 10 years I practiced by myself were the most productive. It was also the most rewarding period of my life both professionally and financially.
The small group environment was a close second as a far as job satisfaction. What little I lost in autonomy was almost balanced by professional stimulation and camaraderie or working shoulder to shoulder with peers. However, all that was lost as our small group was engulfed by a larger entity. Our overhead inflated to a point that it was almost unsustainable. Meetings gobbled up productive office time. Even making little changes that might have allowed us to adapt to the changing clinical landscape seemed to take forever. That is, if they ever happened at all.
From my personal experience, health care delivery doesn’t benefit from the economics of scale that is claimed by other industries. Bigger is not better for health care delivery.
When the promoters of the Affordable Care Act promised that it would encourage cost saving and quality enhancing mergers of health delivery organizations, many other physicians and I had serious doubts about this claim. It turns that our concerns were well founded. The consolidations that were predicted and so eagerly anticipated by the architects of the ACA have occurred, but have not resulted in the promised cost savings or quality improvement.
The results have been so disappointing that Dr. Bob Kocher, special assistant to President Obama for health care and economic policy from 2009 to 2010, has felt the need to issue a mea culpa in the form of an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal ( “How I Was Wrong About ObamaCare,” July 31, 2016). Although Dr. Kocher still believes organizing medicine into networks “that can share information, coordinate care for patients, and manage risk is critical for delivering higher-quality care, generating cost savings and improving the experience for patients,” he acknowledges, “having every provider in health care ‘owned’ by a single organization is more likely to be a barrier to better care.”
He cites recent evidence that “savings and quality improvement are generated much more often by independent primary care doctors than large hospital-centric health systems.” Small independent practices know their patients better. Unencumbered by the weight of multiple organizational layers, they can more nimbly adjust to change. And there will always be change.
Dr. Kocher also admits that he and his co-crafters of the ACA were mistaken in their belief that “it would take three to five years for physicians to use electronic health records effectively.” Unfortunately, he places the failure on what he views as delay tactics by organized medicine. Sadly, he shares this blind spot with too many other former and current government health care officials, most of whom who have never suffered under the burden of a user-unfriendly, free time–wasting, electronic medical record system.
While it is nice of Dr. Kocher to acknowledge his revelation about size, it comes too late. The bridges have already been burned. Most of the smaller independent practices he now realizes could have provided a solution to the accelerating cost of medical care are gone. In some cases, one of forces driving small practices to merge was the cost and complexity of converting to electronic medical records.
The mea culpa that we really need to hear now is the one admitting that the roll out of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) of 2009 and meaningful use requirements were poorly conceived and implemented. Electronic health record systems that are capable of seamlessly communicating with one another, and are inexpensive, intuitive, and user friendly might have allowed more small independent practices to survive.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Email him at pdnews@frontlinemedcom.com .
