Not long ago I interviewed Dr. Todd Sorensen, the CEO of Regional West Medical Center, a 184-bed facility serving a large swath of rural western Nebraska. I've known Dr. Sorensen since junior high school, and we've kept in touch over the years to discuss the health care system from his perspective as a physician and administrator and mine as a health care journalist. At the end of the year he is leaving his position after running the hospital for the last 14 years. What follows are some of his reflections on American health care and what the future might hold.
Lieberman: Will the trend toward hospital consolidation continue?
Sorensen: Yes. The inpatient business will change pretty dramatically. We will lose inpatient volume as services shift out of the hospital. What happens in the hospital will become more complex and challenging. Hospitals will provide more intense care for really sick people. That kind of demanding care will take lots of resources and critical care specialists. The downward pressure on prices along with the need for huge increases in resources will drive hospitals toward more consolidation.
[For more of this story, written by Trudy Lieberman, go to http://www.cfah.org/blog/2014/...midwest-hospital-ceo]
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