Inter-Hospital cooperation: How to measure the effects of the implementation of shared medical time?

Abstract

as part of a Territorial Hospital Community, two hospitals of different sizes have decided to poolsome of their resources by sharing medical time. This was designed as a « winwin » strategy between both institutions, in order to draw in more patients, at the expense of private clinics located in the area. Furthermore, the purpose of this cooperation was also to make up for the lack of medical resources in remote areas. However, ever since this scheme has been implemented, no quantitative study has been performed to figure out whether or not such a partnership is profitable for both hospitals, as was expected. This kind of problem is rather frequent for hospitals involved in cooperation processes, and willing to follow the effects of these partnerships. Most of these institutions would like to have more operational tools and methods to answer their needs. methodology Two engineering studentsfrom Mines ParisTech carried out the study, by analyzing the evolution of the market shares of both hospitals, with respect to a specific area of surgery and in a particular territory. The data used is available on the French Hospital data Bank (BdHF), a tool provided by France’s Hospital Federation and surprisingly largely unknown and unused. What is more, some interviews were carried out in order to have a better understanding of the issues at stake. Results and discussion Both hospitals turn out to have increased their market shares and their incomes since the implementation of the shared medical time. Therefore, it can be inferred that patients are now more often oriented to the public hospitals of the region, rather than towards private clinics. Moreover, both hospital – the larger and the smaller alike – seem to benefit from this strategic scheme. Caution should however be applied when analyzing these results, since the impact of possible external factors has only been studied qualitatively. Conclusion Two main conclusions can be drawn from this study: 1) Thorough surveys led with the use of existing data banks can be helpful when it comesto evaluating a cooperation strategy between two hospitals. Theses tools prove to be extremely useful but are largely unused because of the organizational difficulties to fully exploit them. 2) The case study discussed here goes to show that “win-win” partnerships can exist between two hospitals involved in a cooperation process. This sort of relationship is not necessarily unbalanced and can result in improved efficiency. This is a lesson that needs to be reflected upon, as inter-hospital cooperation is likely to become mandatory in the near future in France.