Hospital primary care physician integration continues to accelerate. This trend is driven by numerous external market factors: Clinical Integration, Strategic Needs, Bundled Payments, and Physician Preference & Lifestyle to name a few. One of the more compelling questions for health systems is how do we best determine how many primary care physicians we need to drive the volume of inpatient and outpatient services required for us to achieve our optimal market position.
Several hospitals we are working with are taking a different approach to answering the “how many question”. Rather than asking how many physicians they need, they are asking “How many practice office visits do we need?”
In today’s world with part time physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants participating in how care is delivered in the primary care setting, trying to determine need based on a physician count just doesn’t work. How a clinic or primary care office generates 10,000 office visits varies greatly from one site to another even within the same system. But those 10,000 visits result in a measurable amount of downstream activity.
So, instead of trying to count doctors consider counting office visits.
Several hospitals we are working with are taking a different approach to answering the “how many question”. Rather than asking how many physicians they need, they are asking “How many practice office visits do we need?”
In today’s world with part time physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants participating in how care is delivered in the primary care setting, trying to determine need based on a physician count just doesn’t work. How a clinic or primary care office generates 10,000 office visits varies greatly from one site to another even within the same system. But those 10,000 visits result in a measurable amount of downstream activity.
So, instead of trying to count doctors consider counting office visits.
Some interesting statistics from a recent study:
- Every 1,000 office visits generates 28 hospital admissions
- Every 1,000 office visits generates 480 outpatient procedures
- A typical Internal Medicine practice generates 38 admissions for every 1,000 visits
- A Family Medicine practice generates 18 admissions per thousand visits
How are you sizing your primary care network?
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Hi Jeff -- it seems that this approach would also provide health systems pursuing specialist integration with a method for determining the optimal ratio of PCPs:specialists in order to optimize the business of the specialty practice. Thanks!
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