Long-term care and hospital collaboration. To survive in a reformed healthcare system, long-term care facilities can initiate hospital-based SNFs.
Establishing relationships with hospitals may be critical for long-term care facilities facing financial pressures and uncertain futures. One option is to initiate collaborative efforts to develop hospital-based skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). Hospitals, under pressure to move patients to less intensive settings and to diversify, are naturally drawn to long-term care as a related business where they can make limited personnel and financial commitments and extend their continuum of care. Before approaching hospitals to initiate collaborative efforts, long-term care providers should understand how they think and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Long-term and acute care providers have many options for collaboration, including management contracts and joint ventures. In a traditional management contract, the long-term care provider furnishes the administrator and a few key staff in exchange for direct reimbursement for those staff plus a management fee. Another option is for the long-term care facility to provide all the staff for a fee or percentage of revenue. Joint venture options are to form a subsidiary corporation to renovate a floor of the hospital or to have the hospital buy a large percentage of the long-term care facility and share the profits. All these options have potential pitfalls, including differing financial expectations and the threat of unionization at the SNF. Nevertheless, for long-term care facilities struggling under reimbursement cutbacks and other pressures, the benefits may outweigh the risks.
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D000368:Aged; D003284:Contract Services; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006299:Health Services for the Aged / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006754:Hospital Restructuring / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D009096:Multi-Institutional Systems / Q000458:organization & administration*; D009935:Organizational Affiliation; D010934:Planning Techniques; D016730:Program Development; D012866:Skilled Nursing Facilities / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000639:trends; D014481:United States