HEALTH AND HOSPITALS AGENCY DEMANDING MORE CONTROL OF DOCTOR PRODUCTIVITY

Abstract

New York City's public hospitals agency is pushing for broad concessions in its contracts with the medical schools and academic medical centers that provide most of the doctors for the city hospitals.

In the first round of negotiations with Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, which provides the majority of doctors for Bronx Municipal Hospital Center, the agency proposed cutting doctors' base salaries at Bronx Municipal by 50% and tying additional payments to the number of patients they treat. It also proposed eliminating some of the hospital's specialty training programs, which the agency says are expensive and redundant. Most dramatically, it sought to require that doctors who work at Bronx Municipal—as a vote of confidence—also receive their health care there. Agency officials say they will make similar demands in other contracts ... The president of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, hired an outside consultant to advise him on how to make the hospitals work. "Our existing contracts give no benchmark for productivity and no standard for quality of care," he added.