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After-Hours Clinic a partnership of health-care David and Goliath
After-Hours Clinic a partnership of health-care David and Goliath
Swedish Medical Center Foundation put down startup money for Country Doctor Community Health Centers to provide weekend and after-hours care for patients who in the past have often turned to hospital emergency rooms for nonemergency treatment.
By Carol M. Ostrom
At Swedish Medical Center’s Cherry Hill hospital, the “EMERGENCY” sign glows bright in the dusk above the emergency-room entrance. Some 18,000 people sought help here last year.
Right next to the sign, there’s another one on the building: “After-Hours Clinic.” Operated by Country Doctor Community Health Centers, this clinic — like Swedish’s ER — is open evenings and weekends.
This isn’t competition, but a partnership few would have predicted before the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Swedish, a huge, specialty-oriented medical center, has plunked down startup money and a cheap lease to help tiny Country Doctor, whose two clinics were started by idealistic community activists in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
So what has brought these two very different organizations together? In a nutshell: the Affordable Care Act (ACA), with the rumbling disruptions in business-as-usual it has energized. It has changed incentives, brought insurance to people who never had it, and focused attention on unnecessary costs...Both sides see themselves benefiting from this partnership in ways that are part financial, part philosophical. Swedish gains a nonemergency after-hours alternative for patients; County Doctor creates another avenue for those who have had trouble accessing daytime care.
The ACA, by bringing insurance to more, makes the deal affordable for Country Doctor. And by signaling that doctors’ and hospitals’ future livelihood will be linked to value, not volume...“Before the ACA, hospitals were kind of silos and the alternative providers were silos,” says Howard Springer, Swedish’s administrative director for accountable-care services. Now, for the first time, he says, the two have mutual incentives to cooperate.
- more -
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2023423205_countrydocswedishxml.html
Swedish Medical Center Foundation put down startup money for Country Doctor Community Health Centers to provide weekend and after-hours care for patients who in the past have often turned to hospital emergency rooms for nonemergency treatment.
By Carol M. Ostrom
At Swedish Medical Center’s Cherry Hill hospital, the “EMERGENCY” sign glows bright in the dusk above the emergency-room entrance. Some 18,000 people sought help here last year.
Right next to the sign, there’s another one on the building: “After-Hours Clinic.” Operated by Country Doctor Community Health Centers, this clinic — like Swedish’s ER — is open evenings and weekends.
This isn’t competition, but a partnership few would have predicted before the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Swedish, a huge, specialty-oriented medical center, has plunked down startup money and a cheap lease to help tiny Country Doctor, whose two clinics were started by idealistic community activists in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
So what has brought these two very different organizations together? In a nutshell: the Affordable Care Act (ACA), with the rumbling disruptions in business-as-usual it has energized. It has changed incentives, brought insurance to people who never had it, and focused attention on unnecessary costs...Both sides see themselves benefiting from this partnership in ways that are part financial, part philosophical. Swedish gains a nonemergency after-hours alternative for patients; County Doctor creates another avenue for those who have had trouble accessing daytime care.
The ACA, by bringing insurance to more, makes the deal affordable for Country Doctor. And by signaling that doctors’ and hospitals’ future livelihood will be linked to value, not volume...“Before the ACA, hospitals were kind of silos and the alternative providers were silos,” says Howard Springer, Swedish’s administrative director for accountable-care services. Now, for the first time, he says, the two have mutual incentives to cooperate.
- more -
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2023423205_countrydocswedishxml.html
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