Navigating the Complexities of Large Corporations Acquiring Smaller Healthcare Practices.

As healthcare consolidation continues unabated, large corporations and equity firms acquire and merge in every kind of market. And while such acquisitions can bring several advantages, including enhanced financial stability, operational efficiencies, and improved access to capital and investments, we must consider the potential disadvantages associated with this trend as well. Those disadvantages include concerns regarding: • The loss of autonomy and local decisionmaking - Deeply rooted in their communities, providers in smaller practices swept up by big corporations may find it harder to respond to the specific needs and preferences of the population they have served. They may feel limited in their ability to tailor services to the specific needs of their patients, or find solutions and innovations apropos to the local community they have been serving. • Impacts on quality of care and patient-centeredness - Large corporations may prioritize cost control, efficiency, and productivity at the expense of a small practice's highly-valued goals of personalized care and patient relationships. • The potential for reduced competition and loss of patient choice - In a free market, it is natural for consolidation to reduce choices for consumers. The FTC says that in an environment of reduced competition, healthcare costs have usually risen--without any improvement in quality. If stakeholders in healthcare mergers and acquisitions do not consider possibilities for the advantages and disadvantages, they will jeopardize the long-term success of the consolidated system. That means the entire planning and negotiating processes--at the front end--must constantly and critically assess these complexities. The plan must include appropriate strategies to enable healthcare professionals and communities to design a new system that ensures enough local control to keep providing patient-centered, accessible, and affordable healthcare of the highest quality possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]