The scramble for physicians by hospitals in recent years has led to more than a dozen physicians cracking a million dollars in compensation—and three dozen receiving at least a half million dollars. Hospitals, meanwhile, are recording big losses on their physician practices.
Dr. Martha Dwenger joined Northwest Radiology Network on April 1. Dwenger previously worked for Columbus Radiology, Columbus Diagnostic Imaging, and as contract radiologist for Northwest Radiology since 2006. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Indiana State University and did her medical training at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Indianapolis-based consulting organization YourEncore has hired Dr. Tim Franson as its chief medical officer. Most recently, Franson was a principal in the health and biosciences practice at FaegreBD Consulting. Franson will continue at Faegre BD until mid-May, when the firm will form an alliance with YourEncore to provide consulting services to life sciences clients. Prior to joining FaegreBD, Franson worked at Eli Lilly and Co. for more than 20 years, where he served as vice president of global regulatory affairs and patient safety, and led Lilly’s U.S. clinical research and trials organization.
Rhonda Deluise, a registered nurse, has been appointed director of quality and support services at Franciscan Visiting Nurse Service, where she has been a manager the past five years. Before joining Franciscan VNS, Deluise was vice president of patient care services for Howard Regional Health System in Kokomo. Deluise received her associate and bachelor degrees in nursing from Indiana University.
Mainstreet Property Group LLC is trying to bring crowdfunding to nursing homes. The Carmel-based firm launched a new round of private placement fundraising Monday using a website run by Oregon-based CrowdStreet Inc. and a mix of traditional advertising in central Indiana. The goal is to raise $500,000 to $2.5 million to help Mainstreet construct a $13.3 million nursing care and rehabilitation facility in Bloomington. Mainstreet CEO Zeke Turner said if the Bloomington “test case” is successful, Mainstreet can use crowdfunding to boost its annual construction of health care campuses from $350 million currently to $500 million. Mainstreet is offering to pay “accredited investors” annual dividends of 10 percent while paying itself a $635,000 development fee. Mainstreet hopes to sell the Bloomington facility by mid-2015, which could boost investor returns to 14 percent. Mainstreet’s crowdfunding experiment comes as the company is under scrutiny over allegations that Turner’s father, state Rep. Eric Turner, helped defeat a nursing home construction moratorium that most of Mainstreet’s competitors supported.
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has signed contracts with 1,400 physicians under its Enhanced Personal Health Care initiative, which pays doctors extra to help keep patients healthier and out of the hospital. The initiative, coupled with accountable care organizations Anthem is working to form with hospitals, is part of a broader push in health care called value-based purchasing. “The biggest challenge in health care today is finding a way to improve quality while reducing costs,” said Dr. David Lee, Anthem’s vice president of provider engagement and contracting. As part of the initiative, Anthem shares with doctors claims information Anthem gathers on its patients so doctors can target their efforts on the patients most in need. Anthem also pays doctors an extra $3.50 per month for each Anthem patient they manage. If overall spending on Anthem patients goes down and doctors document they provided high-quality care, Anthem shares some of the savings with doctors at the end of the year. The enrollment of doctors so far is a bit of a step back from the Quality Health First program Anthem previously operated to encourage physician management of patients’ overall health. That program had 2,200 physcians participating when Anthem pulled out of it in early 2013.
St. Vincent Health and the Cleveland Clinic have partnered in the opening of a new 8,000-square-foot kidney transplant center in Portage, Ind., to see patients before and after their transplant surgeries in Indianapolis. In a press release, St. Vincent noted that the average wait time for a kidney transplant in the Chicago area is six years, compared with 14 months at St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital. Patients waiting for a transplant via another hospital system can transfer their wait times to St. Vincent. St. Vincent and Cleveland Clinic established their transplant partnership five years ago, focusing on kidney and pancreas procedures. Transplant surgeons working at St. Vincent’s 11-bed renal transplant unit in Indianapolis are employed by Cleveland Clinic.
Community Health Network opened a 65,000-square-foot, free-standing cancer center on the campus of Community Hospital South. The facility centralizes all the cancer care providers patients see—including physicians, radiologists, social workers, dieticians and financial counselors—so patients can make fewer visits to the center. Community hopes the center, which includes 16 infusion rooms, serves patients from as far away as Columbus, Seymour, Shelbyville and Greensburg.
Indianapolis hospitals have begun to offer joint replacement surgeries to employers and insurers using “bundled prices.” That means, instead of billing piecemeal for each individual service and supply, the hospitals wrap everything needed from just before to just after surgery into a package deal.
The typical hospital around the country will see its profits wiped out entirely by the changes coming from health reform and the aging of the population. But in Indianapolis, the hits will be cushioned by this region's fatter commercial reimbursements.
Dr. Alexia Torke, an internist, has been named associate director of the Indiana University Center for Aging Research. Torke is a researcher at the Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute and a professor at the IU School of Medicine. The Center for Aging Research works with scientists, clinicians, patients and others to develop and test innovative strategies to improve the quality of health care and self-care of older adults. Torke graduated from Carleton College and received a medical degree from the IU School of Medicine.
Mark Anderson has been named director of Franciscan Physician Network’s Joint Replacement Surgeons of Indiana and the Center for Hip and Knee Surgery at Franciscan St. Francis Health. Anderson, who has worked at Franciscan for 16 years, graduated from Indiana University’s physical therapy program in 1997 and earned an MBA from Indiana Wesleyan University in 2009.
Before local hospitals slashed staff and expenses last year, they had been boosting the pay packages of their top executives faster than hospitals around the country. Seven of every 10 senior executives at the major hospital systems in Indianapolis saw their total compensation rise more than 10 percent from 2010 to 2012.
Lost in all the rhetoric about the Affordable Care Act—website glitches, recriminations and cries for “repeal and replace”—it’s easy to forget the near-universal agreement that today’s health care environment is fragmented and inefficient.
The Accountable Care Consortium was envisioned as a vehicle through which the hospitals would eventually funnel all of their roughly $2.5 billion in annual contracts with health insurers and employers.
Dr. Reva Sharma has joined McFarland Internal Medicine, part of the Franciscan Physician Network. She was most recently a hospitalist at Franciscan St. Francis Health-Mooresville. Sharma earned her medical degree at the Lady Harding Medical School at Delhi University in New Delhi, India.
Chase Kunkel has been appointed accountable care organization counselor for Senior Promise at Franciscan St. Francis Health. Kunkel, a licensed health and life insurance agent, most recently served as a financial consultant for Northwestern Mutual. He earned his undergraduate degree in social and behavioral science at Indiana University.
WellPoint, Inc. named Thomas Zielinski general counsel effective June 2. He replaces John Cannon, who was dismissed without cause from the Indianapolis-based health insurer in March. Zielinski most recently was a partner in the law firm of Morgan Lewis and has been retained as interim general counsel for WellPoint since February 2014.
Peter Haytaian has been named president of WellPoint’s government business division. He replaces Dick Zoretic who announced he will retire from WellPoint on May 31. Haytaian most recently served as president of the Medicaid business in WellPoint’s government business division.
On the eve of Obamacare, almost no central Indiana hospitals were having trouble making money. Hip replacements, heart surgery and Hamilton County were the biggest drivers of profits.
Now that Indianapolis-area hospitals employ large numbers of physicians, a new study suggests the integrated health systems will be able to charge higher prices to private health insurers.
Community brought in more revenue and profit from operations last year. But a spike in charity care caused margins to fall significantly short of expectations of Community executives.
Getting everyone into the same room prior to surgeries is cutting costs and improving health.
While the biggest hospital profit margins are made in the suburbs, the biggest pile of cash—$353 million in 2012—is made at the three downtown campuses run by Indiana University Health. In fact, those hospitals generated 32 percent of all operating gains posted by central Indiana hospitals in 2012.
New data show eight out of 10 Hoosiers with private health insurance are covered by employer plans that are exempt from most Obamacare rules. So, rather than being an invasive train wreck, Obamacare may fail because it doesn’t affect enough people.
