As the cost of healthcare escalates, physician organizations have come under increasing pressure from hospitals, payers, and market competition. Business as usual will not ensure the long term viability of the organization; creation, and execution of a well-defined strategy are essential to success. Some of the questions facing physician organizations today:

• How do we grow our margins?
• How do we expand our funding base to keep up with present and future needs for the primary care physicians and the specialists?
• What changes do we need to make to our governance and our structure?
• How do we strengthen our market position?
• How do we develop potential alliances/partnerships with other physician practices and/or hospitals to strengthen our organization?
• How do we create information technology infrastructure to enhance high quality and efficient patient care?
• What needs to be done in our community to recruit the best and brightest high quality physicians?

Thomas Group Approach

Thomas Group has 30 years of experience building collaborative frameworks and facilitating deep discussion of the most challenging questions and issues, to help bring organizations to consensus. But we’re not the typical strategy consultancy. Having answered the tough questions and defined a viable strategy, your organization still faces significant challenges with execution:

• Prioritizing physician strategic goals, objectives, and allocation of funds can create conflict during the implementation process. Needs of the primary care physicians and the specialists may vary. Objectives such as market share growth, increased patient referrals, utilization, and improved community access emphasize the need for primary care physicians. Specialists, however, will need to continue to develop and expand specialized clinical services, aggressively market, and add or limit physicians to a service niche.
• Communication and early systematic selection/involvement of key physician leaders in the process will reduce the barrier of physician resistance to change. Factors such as diverse range of familiarity and experience with computerization, change in work flow, age of physician, economic pressures stemming from the combination of lower reimbursement and higher expenses and a variety of other factors may cause physician resistance.
• Proper financial planning is necessary to ensure availability of needed funds and appropriate resource allocations. Adequate financial planning and investment based on realistic goals, reasonable targets, and resources required for execution must be established and prioritize.Getting Results

Thomas Group enables physician organizations to achieve their full potential in today’s competitive environment. Our mission is to deliver dramatically improved operating results by helping our clients achieve the cultural change and process improvements required to become market leaders and maintain a competitive edge. Thomas Group values are:

Our People –Our clients value Thomas Group’s executives for their diverse business experience, professionalism, leadership, objectivity, cultural and process analytical skills and the intensity and speed at which they drive results.

Our Client’s Focus –We design a strategy, architecture and implementation program specifically focused to solve each client’s unique business needs.

Our Methodology –We work personally and directly with client leadership to deliver cultural and process-based solutions that achieve exceptional operating results. We lead client management teams to improve their responsiveness to customers, accelerate results at all levels while reducing the resources needed to achieve change.

Time –We skillfully and rapidly navigate client teams through an implementation and continuous improvement engagement to remove the difficult cultural and process barriers that have limited competitiveness.