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Cornerstone my health report12/28/2023 In hindsight, Cornerstone moved too fast, too soon. It also suggests that while independent practices like Cornerstone’s may have more flexibility than big hospitals to test new business models, they may not have the capital or financial savvy to succeed. As Cornerstone learned, hospitals and doctors frequently fight the changes, because they believe they can make the most money under a fee-for-service model. The practice now stands less as a shining example of what medicine can become and more as a cautionary tale.Ĭornerstone’s experience illuminates just how tough it can be to overhaul the way medical care is delivered, even when the change is a priority for doctors and the government. Last May, unable to go it alone, Cornerstone was bought by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, a major hospital system in the area. Over the next year and a half, Cornerstone was thrust into a financial crisis. There were also dueling lawsuits, including one accusing the practice of gross mismanagement. In the months that followed, nearly 70 of its 228 doctors left, many attracted by the chance to make more money at area hospitals. Burwell’s announcement, an exodus of doctors had begun at Cornerstone. Stambaugh, Cornerstone’s chief medical officer.īut the confirmation proved premature. “To us, it was a total validation that we chose the right path,” said Dr. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, pledged that by 2018, half of traditional Medicare payments - tens of billions of dollars - would be based on models like Cornerstone’s. Medicare, the giant federal health insurance program, had wholeheartedly embraced the idea. In recent years, several hundred accountable care experiments have sprung up nationwide.Īnd by early 2015, Cornerstone’s bet looked like a winner. The idea is to make doctors more mindful of costs - Is that test really necessary? - while keeping people healthier and away from pricey hospital visits. There’s a term for this: an accountable care organization. Cornerstone Health Care, a large physician group here, made a big bet a few years back: It would get paid based not on how many procedures its doctors performed, but on how effectively they treated their patients.
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