Economic Credentialing—Dead or Alive in an Era of Healthcare Reform and Competition?

Partner Michael Callahan will moderate a panel on “Economic Credentialing—Dead or Alive in an Era of Healthcare Reform and Competition?” at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 28.

Topics of the conference include:

• An overview healthcare industry developments affecting quality and costs and its impact on credentialing and privileging policies
• Should hospitals and medical staffs adopt "conflict-of-interest" or other screening policies to identify physician financial conflicts at time of appointment and reappointment?
• Can identified conflicts be legally be used to screen out new applicants to the medical staff—what about at reappointment time?
• What are the right and wrong ways to utilize physician profiling data within a hospital which is designed to monitor and compare physician costs, utilization, and quality performance outcomes?
• Are there win-win strategies that hospitals and medical staffs can develop to address ways to improve a hospital's bottom line and its quality outcomes without adversely affecting physician membership and/or clinical privileges?

The presentation examines the implication of a recent court ruling which struck down a hospital's policy that attempted to restrict medical staff members and their families from having any ownership or economic interest in a competing facility, and also presents two more typical hospital/physician economic scenarios from a hospital and medical staff perspective in terms of identifying areas of legal and political difficulties as well as proposed win-win solutions.