Physician-hospital Arrangements

Please provide assistance with the following questions:

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Choose 2 types of physician-hospital arrangements and address the following questions:

Compare the major points of these 2 types as they pertain to:

(a) Physician-hospital relationships.

(b) Which in your eyes is more effective? Explain your reasons for your decision. © BrainMass Inc. brainmass.com March 21, 2019, 5:27 pm ad1c9bdddf
https://brainmass.com/health-sciences/health-care-management/221220

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• Professional Integration.docx

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1. Choose 2 types of physician-hospital arrangements and address the following questions: (a) compare points as they pertain to physician-hospital relationships, and (b) Which in your eyes is more effective? Explain your reasons for your decision.

A striking development in the health care market place has been the formation of strategic relationships between hospitals and physicians.

(1) Hospital-physician integration (HPO)

HPO appears to be a response to rapidly expanding managed care health insurance. These authors examine whether integration lead to efficiency gains from transaction cost economies thereby allowing providers to offer managed care insurance plans lower prices or whether integration is really a strategy to improve bargaining power and thereby increase prices. They found that integration has little effect on efficiency, but is associated with an increase in prices, especially when the integrated organization is exclusive and occurs in less competitive markets. This might mean you would not prefer this method.

However, hospital-physician integration likely reflects providers’ organizational responses to competitive pressures from rapidly expanding managed care health insurance. A number of authors have hypothesized that hospital-physician integration likely leads to efficiency gains by facilitating the exploitation of transaction cost economies such …