Reflecting on the Successes of 2016

UH Clinical Update - February 2017

By Cliff A. Megerian, MD, FACS, President, University Hospitals Physician Services

Congratulations on what you as physicians, and therefore we as a system, accomplished together in 2016. By any measure, University Hospitals had a tremendously successful year at a time when operating results for many other outstanding health systems declined. And our physician community shares the benefits in being part of our winning organization.

Excellence in patient satisfaction

We know that superior patient satisfaction is only possible through diligent work by physicians and clinicians throughout our health system. We especially should be proud to have achieved excellence in patient satisfaction, with three UH hospitals – UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital and UH Geauga and Conneaut medical centers – earning perfect scores on all 10 of the system’s patient-satisfaction measures. And UH as a system achieved its collective patient-satisfaction target – an ambitious goal. 

Effective Accountable Care Organizations

Also notable is the performance of our UH Accountable Care Organizations, which are among the largest in the country with more than 300,000 members benefiting from our population health services. ACOs engage providers across the spectrum of health care services to work together as a comprehensive, integrated care delivery system. When our ACOs effectively manage the cost and quality of care and the overall health of a designated population, our physicians share in the savings achieved.

Your support for care coordination, coupled with UH’s high-quality care providers and focus on patient experience, achieved cost savings while improving performance against national quality benchmarks. For example, while Medicare set a target of a 2.1 percent savings reduction per member per month, we exceeded that by coming in with a 2.3 percent reduction.

As a result, UH physicians have and will continue to receive significant portions of the shared savings distribution.

Increased productivity

In 2016, many of our faculty physicians increased their clinical productivity and, as a result, they earned significantly higher compensation and incentive awards. At the end of 2016, overall physician productivity was at 72 percent. Our target is that all physicians perform at or above the 50th percentile of wRVU (work Relative Value Unit) productivity for their applicable specialty based on national benchmarks. 

As we look to the future, it is important that we achieve the right balance in order to sustain our legacy of excellence in teaching and clinical care. To this end, we are working very hard to delineate our research objectives and goals and carve out significant allowances for teaching. These initiatives are primarily applicable on main campus at the academic medical center, but also have relevance in the community.

Clearly, UH physicians are rising to the challenges of our changing times through remarkable performance. I applaud your accomplishments, and your constant efforts to provide the highest-quality care for our patients. And I steadfastly believe, and hope you agree, that there is no better place than UH to pursue your physician calling.