After the breakup: What doctors can do when hospitals split up

When merged health care organizations part ways, it can leave physicians in a pinch. Or with new opportunities.

By Katherine Vogt, AMNews staff. Oct. 24/31, 2005.

Experts say that at least once or twice a year, a hospital system breaks up. And some believe that the number of breakups could increase in coming years, with regulators beginning to take closer looks at existing mergers.

Not only can these "de-mergers" be extremely costly, cumbersome and destabilizing for the institutions involved, but they also can leave physicians feeling like they have been caught in the middle, squeezed by both sides like children whose parents go through a divorce.

Physicians in those situations should be prepared for a transition period that could affect their practices with changes to the facility's vendor relationships, credentialing practices, quality standards, leadership and more. And all of those changes can combine to prompt physicians to reconsider where they practice.

This doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, particularly if you're an independent physician without an exclusive contract at a hospital. Some experts say those physicians can benefit by hospital systems that were once one now competing for doctors' services.

Still, they say, the process is long, and not so easy.

One particularly messy split has been unfolding in Houston, where after roughly 50 years of partnership, Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital decided to go their separate ways, citing differing strategic visions.

The breakup, announced in April 2004, has been anything but easy, and recently the state attorney general stepped in to try to force the ex-partners to quit feuding.