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Fee-for-value leader Dr. Beauregard joins CMG

 

George Beauregard, D.O., has joined Cambridge Management Group (CMG) as a senior adviser. Dr. Beauregard has been a leader in moving hospitals and physicians into the new world of fee-for-value care.

He has 20 years of experience in private practice in internal medicine and vast experience with pay for performance; performance- and risk-based contracts involving commercial and Medicare payers; EMR/HIT implementation, and Accountable Care Organization and Bundled Payment development.

In his recent role as senior vice president and chief clinical officer for the PinnacleHealth System, based in Harrisburg, Pa., he worked closely with the clinical and administrative leadership to help PinnacleHealth achieve enterprise- wide success in successful CMS Accountable Care and Bundled Payment initiatives; quality and performance improvement; clinical integration, and HIT optimization. This helped lead CMS to welcome RiverHealth ACO, of which PinnacleHealth is a founding member, into the 2014 Medicare Shared Savings Program.

Prior to joining PinnacleHealth, in September 2012, Dr. Beauregard was president and chief medical officer of Southcoast Physicians Network, in Massachusetts.  His leadership helped gain Southcoast admission into the 2013 Medicare Shared Savings Program.

Before that, he was co-founder, in 1996, of Primary Care LLC, the largest independent community-based primary-care-physician network in eastern Massachusetts. Dr. Beauregard guided a merger of that entity with Tufts Medical Center in 2005 to form the New England Quality Care Alliance (NEQCA), where he then served as chairman of the board for four years. He also was trustee of Tufts Medical Center Physicians Organization Inc.

George Beauregard is a graduate of the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine. He has been awarded Diplomate Certificates by the American Board of Internal Medicine and the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners.

 


Tufts Medical Center’s core challenge

 

Tufts Medical Center seeks new ways to market itself as it competes with giant competitors after the collapse of its merger talks with Boston Medical Center.

As The Boston Globe notes: “Tufts … straddles the ground between an elite academic medical center and a safety net hospital. Tufts surgeons, for example, perform more heart transplants than at any other hospital in the state. Still, about 60 percent of its patients are covered by … Medicare and Medicaid, a higher portion than at many other hospitals.”

“If Tufts fails to grow, it risks losing business to larger systems that can serve more patients and use their market clout to extract higher payments from insurers.

The Globe says: “Tufts executives say the end of the BMC talks underscores that the hospital’s future lies beyond Boston, where they will seek to link up with other hospitals and expand their network of doctors. They point to the merger with Lowell General as a model.”

How about a merger with Providence-based Lifespan? Or does Partners HealthCare want that for itself?

“Our goal is not to be a big megamedical center in downtown Boston that would require pulling patients into Boston to basically fill the beds. Our goal is to be a nimble, small, academic medical center that works in partnership with the community,” Michael Wagner, M.D., told The Globe.


Tufts, BMC merger talks fall apart

 
Boston Medical Center and Tufts Medical Center have called off their merger talks aimed at what would have been the biggest alliance of two hospitals in the hospital-rich city in nearly two decades.

 

The Boston Globe reported that they couldn’t overcome “differences in culture, mission, and strategies for the future.”

“Culture always trumps strategy,” Ellen Lutch Bender, president of the consulting firm Bender Strategies LLC, told The Globe.

However, officials said that the two institutions remain open to future collaborations.

 


Will hospital mergers lead to unionization wave?

 

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A large labor union, the Service Employees International Union Local 1199, looks at  merger negotiations between Boston Medical Center and Tufts Medical Center as a chance to increase hospital-worker union membership. Layoffs are almost inevitable in such mergers, and the union will use that fear to push unionization.

As the wave of hospital mergers continue around America, will more and more workers turn to unions for relief?

 


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