"It’s a challenge in a relatively stable market to get a group of physicians to change what they are doing today because they believe that it is critical to their success tomorrow. The Tompkins Group did an excellent job of putting our market into focus and creating recommendations that made sense – and our physicians ‘owned’ both the process and the results."

Perry Kalis, M.D.
President
Medical Specialists, Inc.
Zanesville, Ohio

Medical Specialists of rural Zanesville, Ohio, is a multi-specialty physician group located about an hour’s drive from two metropolitan areas in which managed care’s presence is growing. The group’s leaders recognized that they needed to have in place a strategy for the day when "managed care came to town."

To help the group develop a managed care strategy, The Tompkins Group led a process in which:

• a cross-section of physician leaders was identified and recruited to participate in a managed care task force;
• market interviews were conducted with key employers, other health care providers, and HMOs, to understand how quickly the market was moving toward managed care, and why;
• HMOs were stratified into three groups, prioritizing their importance in terms of relationship building;
• four strategies, all of which "make good business sense" in either a fee-for-service or an at-risk environment, were developed; their rationale and specific goals and objectives were clearly articulated and communicated; and
• an implementation plan, defining detailed initiatives and timeframes and drawing additional physicians into focused committees, was formulated for each strategy.