How Physician-Hospital Joint Ventures Can Bring You Better Care

If you're hearing terms such as "physician owned hospital" and "healthcare joint ventures" in reference to new medical facilities in your area, you may be wondering what all the talk is about. Physician-hospital joint ventures allows doctors to assume a degree of autonomy over their workplace, which not only helps them prosper but can also prove highly beneficial to patients. Here are some of the ways you stand to benefit from making use of these hospitals and clinics.

Narrow Focus

Many of these facilities -- and their patients -- benefit from a relatively medical focus. Doctor owned hospitals can create pools of specialists in a particular field, such as heart surgery or orthopedic medicine. Entire hospitals are springing up devoted to these specialized care concentrations. This kind of focused expertise help to guarantee that you're surrounded by the best possible people and resources to address your specific medical need. 

Lower Costs

Healthcare joint ventures that have the freedom to limit their work to particular specialties can perform more procedures with a narrower range of medical devices and a smaller staff, passing the resulting savings on to the patient. It's estimated that these types of facilities could reduce costs for specialized procedures by up to 20 percent.

But focused expertise isn't the only way cost effectiveness can improve dramatically under physician ownership:

• When physicians can speak as the owners of their healthcare facility, they tend to have more sway with vendors who would normally charge whatever they please for necessary medical equipment and supplies.
• Physician owned hospitals can set spending limits on major equipment purchases, with such purchases requiring approval from other physicians serving on the hospital's board, thus keeping all the medical partners honest about their expenditures.

More Amenities

The patient experience is another major selling point for these facilities. One of the reasons physician owned hospitals have become increasingly popular across the U.S. is the high level of comfort and personal service many of them provide. These facilities operate on the principal that making patients happy goes beyond simply prescribing medications or performing procedures.

You may feel that you've wandered into a five-star hotel or an exclusive health spa the first time you venture into a physician owned hospital that offers concierge services, beautiful surroundings, and a ratio of one nurse for every patient. These hospitals routinely get high marks in patient satisfaction surveys -- and they just might score high on your list as well.

As you can see, a properly run physician owned hospital can bring patients the seemingly magical combination of better care and lower prices. If you hear of such a facility in your town, maybe it's time you placed a call to schedule that long-overdue examination or surgery!