Stout’s area of expertise stretches far beyond valuation services. With a team of diverse professionals with backgrounds in hospital and practice operations, provider reimbursement, and legal and regulatory compliance, we offer a broad range of strategic and advisory services within the healthcare space.

Select Services Highlights

Hospital-Physician Alignment & Clinical Integration

As a trusted advisor to the healthcare community for over two decades, we have observed and supported the development and evolution of hospital-physician alignment strategies and models across the continuum. More recently, our extensive experience with alignment models is helping our clients achieve their goals related to the shift towards value-based care.

Success in a value-based world requires streamlined delivery of high-quality, lower-cost healthcare with an emphasis on stakeholder satisfaction. Healthcare entities are facing increasing pressure from payors and consumers to operationalize value-based initiatives that will command transparency, sophisticated data structures, and evidence-based, reliable mechanisms by which to track and report outcomes.

Absent affiliations, both larger organizations and independent provider groups may not have the ability to meaningfully operationalize alternative pay models and value-based contracts. For example, regulatory barriers and cost-prohibitive technology infrastructure can limit the capacity of independent providers and groups to optimize their role in the delivery of high-value, population-based care across the continuum. However, with the right resources and the expertise, knowledge and entrepreneurial proficiency of independent physicians, collective synergies provide the foundation for success in value-based care.

Hospital-Based Service Line Optimization

With increasing pressures on reimbursement, a shift in focus by payors to inpatient costs and outcomes, and consolidation in the physician market, health systems and hospitals face numerous demands in operating efficient and high-quality service lines. For many facilities, contracts for coverage of key service lines — anesthesiology, emergency medicine, intensive care units, hospitalist medicine, radiology, trauma centers, etc. — represent the single largest expense with outside physician vendors. What was previously a cost of doing business has become one of the primary drivers of a health system’s financial and operational success.

We have been engaged to consult on thousands of hospital-based clinical coverage arrangements (HBCCAs) including advising our clients throughout the request for proposal process. From this experience, we have gained unmatched insight into the trends of HBCCAs. This insight has given our clients the ability to remain competitive and financially healthy despite the ever-increasing costs associated with HBCCAs.

Provider-Compensation Plan Design & Implementation

The process of creating or modifying a provider compensation plan is often one of the most sensitive and challenging initiatives an organization can undertake. As a market leader in healthcare valuation and advisory services, we bring unparalleled breadth and depth of experience to provider compensation plan development, including:

• Detailed insight into compensation plan trends across the country
• Knowledge gained from years of collaboration with physician and executive leadership
• A successful track record of assisting with the design and implementation of compensation plan structures, ranging from the most basic to the most novel

Our team of professionals works closely with executive and provider leadership to offer solutions tailored to each organization’s specific cultural, operational, and financial circumstances and objectives in all areas of compensation plan design, ranging from developing compensation plans for new groups and/or specialties, to introducing new compensation elements or rebalancing existing plan components to support new payor contracts, organizational evolution, financial considerations, and/or changing market conditions.

Provider Needs Assessment

Efficient deployment of providers is critical to the ongoing success of healthcare organizations. However, provider recruitment continues to challenge health systems across the United States. Furthermore, with ever-growing competition, organization leaders are constantly optimizing and identifying service line opportunities through periodic reviews of their current marketplace to meet the needs of their communities and patients.

We routinely partner with healthcare clients to achieve complex strategic planning goals, including provider needs assessments. Through our long history of performing provider needs assessments, we have developed a unique approach, which goes beyond the reference to national trend data or analyzing projected growth, but also includes an intrinsic understanding of the local market.

Litigation Support

Learn more about our expertise in healthcare litigation support.