Shop Talk: Where Business And Health Care Collide | Q&A with Jack Dutzar, president and CEO of Reliant Medical Group
JACK DUTZAR
TITLE: President and CEO, Reliant Medical Group (formerly Fallon Clinic)
HOMETOWN: Polson, Mont.
RESIDENCE: Grafton
EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree, Whitworth College, Spokane, Wash.; M.D., University of Colorado
The health care industry is going through a maelstrom of change, from insurance providers to caregivers, from a fee-for-service care system to one that focuses on individual health management. Dr. Jack Dutzar is in the middle of that and talks about the industry, as well as the recent name change that transformed Fallon Clinic into Reliant Medical Group.
What does the name change from Fallon Clinic to Reliant Medical Group accomplish, aside from reducing confusion with Fallon Community Health Plan?
Really, primarily, that's it. As a business, we've known for a couple, three or four years now that brand confusion was problematic to us because people thought they couldn't come to see our physicians unless they had Fallon Community Health Plan Insurance. Which was true eight or nine years ago ... but is not true today. Beyond that, our employees were constantly inundated with questions related to insurance that they, of course, couldn't answer because they had no connection to that.
You're a physician and an executive. How do those two roles mesh?
Well, some days you kind of wonder (laughs). One of the key components of our mission statement is that we're physician-led. And for me, in particular, what that means is that physicians are the folks who are best served to define how health care is delivered. But the roles are really quite different. One of the challenges of being a physician-executive is that you have to be able to move through both worlds of being in a position of operating a successful, thriving business while ... assuring that every patient is cared for with the highest possible standards.
What's the biggest challenge you confront as an executive in the health care industry today?
Uncertainty. We think we know where health care reform is going. We think we know where payment reform is going. The good news for us is that both are headed in the sweet spot of what we're really good at. But being uncertain about that is a real challenge in terms of where you make the investments necessary and thinking in terms of whether or not you're going to be able to sustain and afford the investments you've made.
If somebody were to decide, for example, that we're going to go back to fee-for-service medicine, I will have made a bunch of really unfortunate choices. Because we're investing in all sorts of ways in helping to keep our patients healthy and ... keeping them safely out of the hospital.
Health care is a front-and-center debate in business and politics today. Out of all the issues that surface in that debate - cost, access, the role of government, and choices - which is the easiest to solve?
There's an old aphorism in health care management: cost, quality, or access. Pick any two. (That's) patently cynical. My whole career has been dedicated to proving that false. But the easy way to go is to solve for two of the three: You can keep costs down by reducing quality and provide plenty of access. You can increase and improve quality and improve access, but you're going to potentially struggle with costs. The fundamental belief that drives my work every day is that there's so much waste in the system that we ought to be able to solve for improving all three.
Which is the hardest to solve?
If you want to deal with it in a statutory way, then cost is far and away the most difficult because there are lots and lots of different stakeholders and they're all making pretty good money in the process: pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, physician groups. (Also) various ancillary kinds of providers like radiology, physical therapy.
Do websites such as WebMD.com make a doctor's job easier? Or more challenging?
I think more challenging in many ways. The Internet is nondiscriminatory as to whether the information is good information or not, so you can end up with things ... that are just not helpful.
What advice would you give to anyone today who wants to be a doctor?
It's the best profession anybody could aspire to. And the reason I say that is because of the value that is returned to you through the opportunities it creates to help people. And to be in a position of supporting other people in a way that no other profession can. Which is when they're at their most anxious, most vulnerable, and you're able to be there and provide them with what they need. That's ultimately the reward in medicine.
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