A beneficial partnership.

Byline: The Register-Guard

People trying to parse the significance of Oregon Medical Group's announcement Thursday that it is exploring a partnership with Triad Hospitals Inc. could learn a lot from this comment by Rosie Pryor:

"For all intents and purposes our primary customers are physicians."

That may come as a surprise to folks who assumed patients were a hospital's primary customers, but Pryor, director of marketing and planning at McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center, knows the truth is that the doctor-hospital relationship is at least as important to a hospital's success as its relationship with patients.

Physicians are the face of health care. Patients go first to their family doctors. For more specialized care, family doctors refer their patients to specialists. Should they require hospitalization, patients select hospitals primarily on the basis of physician recommendations.

Physicians shape hospital services and capabilities by requiring the ability to perform certain procedures using state-of-the-art equipment. It's a symbiotic relationship: Hospitals that want to build their reputation in a particular specialty or develop clientele in a specific location often affiliate with doctors who enhance those goals.

Oregon Medical Group is the second-largest medical practice in the Eugene-Springfield area behind PeaceHealth Medical Group, whose doctors practice almost exclusively at the PeaceHealth-owned Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene. OMG physicians practice at both hospitals, but a partnership with McKenzie-Willamette would be good news for those who support viable, competing hospitals in Lane County.

It's a good fit for OMG, which already has more than 20 doctors practicing at McKenzie-Willamette in Springfield. OMG doctors are part of McKenzie-Willamette's Physician Leadership Group, another is chief of the medical staff, and another is trauma medical director.

Nothing better illustrates the importance of the doctor-hospital relationship than Triad's strong commitment to the controversial Delta Ridge hospital site in north Eugene. Triad, the Texas-based majority owner of McKenzie-Willamette, knows how important efficiency is to physicians, whose time is being squeezed from all directions.

Doctors serving patients at both the new McKenzie-Willamette at Delta Ridge and the new Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield would have an easy commute between hospitals on good highways. Some of the potential sites in west Eugene and elsewhere were nonstarters because of physician objections to the travel time between hospitals.

A relationship between OMG and McKenzie-Willamette also makes sense from another perspective: strategic flexibility. When physicians and hospitals form beneficial business alliances, they position themselves to respond more effectively to the rapid changes taking place in the health care industry. Such partnerships can preserve capital and harness expertise to develop new clinical services as patient needs shift.