If you are like many patients, your physician is now working for a hospital.

Patients across the country are seeing their doctors’ offices suddenly change hands. This can be unsettling, especially for those patients with chronic conditions who have had a trusting relationship with their doctor for many years.

Why is this happening?

Nationwide, hospital systems are acquiring physician groups as they prepare for a system that reimburses based on quality of care, outcomes and cost control rather than the traditional fee-for-service system. The hope is stronger physician alignment will leave health care systems better positioned to meet the demands to reduce waste and reward value instead of volume.

By integrating physician practices and sharing one patient medical record, a health system can begin analyzing their patient database to determine which patients would most benefit from preventive care and interventions that could reduce admissions, readmissions and emergency department (ED) visits.

Many systems have started employing care management coordinators to work with high-risk patients in physician offices, facilitate post-acute care transitions and extend patient access to care. The overall goal is that by emphasizing care coordination, prevention and chronic disease management through physician practice integration, we can improve quality and reduce cost.

So how does this benefit the patient?

The most noticeable benefit to patients is a more streamlined experience.

When a private practice becomes part of a larger group, it is often easier to have much of the administrative work done on the back end — accessing records from anywhere in the group, providing fast or even immediate referrals and having the staff across the system completely informed of the patient’s status.

Patients will have less waiting time and less burden for providing paperwork in these instances due to the efficiency of these systems.

Also, the patient may get more one-on-one time with the doctor, resulting in better overall care. In addition, care coordination for the patients is often more efficient, which can lead to avoiding unnecessary costs due to unnecessary procedures.

At St. James Parish Hospital we have grown our hospital-owned physician clinics and now have five clinics:

1) Lutcher Family Clinic

2) Poche Medical Clinic

3) St. James Surgical Specialists

4) St. James Urology Clinic

5) St. James West Bank Clinic

For every physician practice that the hospital welcomed, we upgraded their information technology and added electronic health records that integrate with the hospital medical record.

We also upgraded or built new office space and hired additional staff. To expand access, we opened St. James Urgent Care in February of 2016. Our goal, as always, is to improve access and enhance the patient experience.

At St. James Parish Hospital our vision is to be your first choice for primary health care needs.

We hope that by adding new clinics, enhancing the patient experience with state of the art facilities, technology and service and improving access and availability after hours we will be your first choice for primary health care needs.

Mary Ellen Pratt is St. James Parish Hospital CEO. She can be reached at info@sjph.org.