Primary Care Concepts, for example, decided early on to turn down offers of capital from hospitals and groups of specialists in order to retain a strong primary care focus. Since MSOs are still so new, consultants say they can't estimate exactly how many are funded by outside sources. Anthony M. Kotin, ACP Member, a practice consultant with Towers Perrin in Chicago, is concerned about how this will affect MSOs. The essential question is what is the real value that they can bring to a physician. Even some hospital-run MSOs have not typically proved very good at the MSO business.
Hospitals do DRGs.
Doctors' offices don't do that. To an internist, that's a lot of money. While some MSOs are proving to be ineffective forces in some doctors' lives, others surprise physicians by just how much they ask them to change their practice habits. The most successful MSOs, it seems, make physicians give up more autonomy than some doctors might have bargained for. Dr. Gustafson's MSO in Chicago, for instance, gives him data about utilization and patient satisfaction.