Safety Net Clinic Week Is Almost Here!

Don't forget to celebrate Safety Net Clinic Week! Safety Net Clinic Week, August 18th - 22nd, is a week dedicated to celebrating Rural Health Clinics and Community Safety Net Clinics. In its fifth year, this week provides the opportunity to express our appreciation and gratitude to all the clinics who dedicate their time, energy and resources to serving their communities. Despite limited human and technical resources, these clinics are creating innovative solutions to delivering patient-centered, high quality care to patients in your community!  

IOM Report Questions Physician Shortage

An Institute of Medicine panel's vision for overhauling Medicare-funded medical training questions two beliefs that are widely held in healthcare: that a severe physician shortage is imminent and the only way to avoid it is an infusion of federal money for more residency positions. The report (found here), written by a 21-member committee co-chaired by former CMS administrators Dr. Donald Berwick and Gail Wilensky, says shortages are created by poor geographic distribution of physicians and lopsided ratios of primary care and specialty physicians and that recent research suggests the answers lie in new technology and innovations in healthcare delivery.

Read more about the report and reaction from physician groups in or Modern Healthcare.

Mounting Challenges Put Nonprofit Hospitals At Tipping Point

According to a report released Wednesday from Standard & Poor's Rating Services, small and stand-alone nonprofit hospitals are facing mounting pressure from weak operating margins and lower patient volumes, with more signals of stress on the way.

The rating agency warned the healthcare sector was at, "a tipping point where negative forces have started to outweigh many providers' ability to implement sufficient countermeasures." Beginning in 2013 and continuing into this year, credit downgrades outpaced upgrades at an accelerating rate.

Stand-alone providers are under greater pressure from physician departures, rising bad debt and higher employee benefit costs. To shoulder the challenges, smaller providers have increasingly sought out mergers with larger health systems in order to seek scale and offset increasing operating pressures. Larger healthcare organizations can better leverage their scale with vendors and insurers, eliminate duplicate services, absorb major IT project costs, as well as attract top management and physicians. Read the article in Reuters here.