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Dr. Jerry Thompson

Memphis Medical Society President-Elect Urges Physicians to “Get on Board” with Quality Initiatives

Jerry Thompson, MD, hopes to accomplish a priority goal during his upcoming presidency of Memphis Medical Society: to help community physicians embrace change.

“The only one thing constant is change, and with healthcare reform, we’re undergoing unprecedented change in medicine,” said Thompson, president-elect of the society and chairman of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) Department of Otolaryngology, and the Tennessee Medical Association (TMA) Insurance Issues Committee. “People naturally want things to remain the same. The one thing I want to come out of my presidency is that physicians embrace change so they can be proactive.”

Thompson, a pediatric otolaryngologist who earned a medical degree and completed training at the University of California Medical School in Los Angeles, referenced a famous southern expression that represents the pending sweeping changes of healthcare reform: “If you’re not at the table, you may be part of the meal.”

“I love that phrase,” he said. “It’s so true. If I can get the doctors to the table and get them involved, when the cuts come, they won’t impair their ability to not only deliver quality of care, but they’ll feel confident about delivering a higher quality of care despite decreased reimbursements.”

Thompson, who returned to school early in his career to earn an MBA to better understand the practice management side of medicine, is well respected for his views on quality initiatives to help physicians navigate the tides of change. At a conference presented last fall through a joint initiative by TMA, UTHSC, Healthy Memphis Common Table, and Bluff City and Memphis medical societies, with underwriting provided by BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, he made an impact by putting insurers on notice that the TMA would be closely monitoring their activity.

“The major drive of the healthcare market of the future is to cut costs. Community efforts where doctors can proactively lower their costs by following good practice standards that they helped create and feel comfortable with, while also maintaining quality, will allow physicians to be better prepared and more survivable in the coming world,” he said. “The most important question for doctors is: are you going to be on the list?”

Referencing a domino effect that began in the early 1980s, Thompson pointed out that BlueCross decided to pursue going public, and when the company was listed on the stock exchange, stockholders demanded a return on investment.

“So insurers started looking for ways to gain a return on investment,” he said. “They started decreasing reimbursements to doctors during the golden age of medicine.”

Soon after Thompson began practicing medicine, he received a letter from an insurer that said if he agreed to a 20 percent decrease in reimbursement, he would be listed in the preferred provider book.

“I didn’t know any better, so I went ahead and did it,” he said. “The older doctors around me refused and I was the only one with patients. The same thing’s going to happen again. If you’re not on the list of preferred providers for the ACOs (accountable care organizations) or the companies on these exchanges, you may not have patients coming in your door.”

Because these measures will drive down costs, it’s important for physicians to work collaboratively, Thompson emphasized.

“We can be proactive and establish quality measures for chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes, areas where we can probably get really significant cost savings,” he said. “More importantly, we need to do this as a community because national standards may not reflect the culture of our community.”

Thompson admitted that expediting initiatives would require some stimulus.

“The Memphis Medical Society is administered by doctors, and doctors trust doctors,” he said. “If you only have administrators involved in determining quality initiatives, there’s not going to be buy-in on the part of the doctors. If doctors see the benefits to themselves and their patients, they’ll buy in. The medical society is the greatest way to get them to buy in because we’re already verbal, active, and have done a good job leading the physician community. We’ve helped doctors with medical malpractice issues, the complexities of the healthcare market, legally in court battles, and legislatively through lobbying.”

Community leaders will be needed to garner buy-in from patients for innovative and different methods of healthcare delivery, Thompson noted.

“The new healthcare may be administered by nurse practitioners, coordinated through their church, or delivered in all sorts of untried, unknown ways to achieve the goal of reducing the cost of healthcare while also improving the quality of care delivered,” he said. “We just haven’t worked out how we’re going to do that yet.”

For example, because ACOs will become an integral part of the revamped healthcare system, Thompson said it will be very important to have multiple ACOs in the community, and physician influence will be needed for that to happen.

“We all went into medicine because we enjoy what we do,” said Thompson. “We feel good about helping people. If we feel that we have input into changes through healthcare reform, we’ll make wiser decisions.”

Tags:

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee., Bluff City Medical Society, Department of Otolaryngology, Dr. Jerry Thompson, Memphis Medical Society, Tennessee Medical Association, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, UTHSC

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