Southwestern Health Resources, the joint operating company formed by UT Southwestern Medical Center and Texas Health Resources, has installed its senior management team as it prepares to begin operations April 1.
The venture, which was announced last October, combines UT Southwestern's William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital and its Zale Lipshy University Hospital, both in Dallas, with Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. It also creates a network of more than 3,000 primary-care and specialty physicians.
The venture will involve a heavy investment in information technology to allow seamless, real-time communication across the group.
Southwestern Health Resources has installed four physicians as senior executive officers. Dr. John Warner, CEO of UT Southwestern University Hospitals, will oversee the newly created joint-operating company.
Dr. Daniel Varga, Texas Health's chief clinical officer, will oversee the physician network, working alongside Dr. Mack Mitchell, UT Southwestern's associate vice president for population health, who will serve as chief medical officer of the physician network.
Dr. Bruce Meyer, UT Southwestern's executive vice president for health system affairs, will lead a soon-to-be-created population-health services company that will provide research services to support the physician network. Over the next few months, Southwestern Health Resources will begin assembling that company.
UT Southwestern and Texas Health already participate in an accountable care organization under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) with 60,000 patients. Over the next year, the partners plan to expand the ACO to 125,000 patients, making it one of the largest MSSP participants in the country, Varga said.
“The biggest thing for the network in the short-term is really building the model of care,” he said. “We're looking to create a highly standardized, highly reliable patient experience within the network—and the same sort of thing for providers.”
Both organizations already use electronic medical records from Epic Systems Corp., but need to build the infrastructure that will allow physicians to communicate with each other in real time, Warner said. “There will be significant expense and effort involved in creating that infrastructure,” he added, but could not quantify the size of the investment.
Coming together will involve a “big play on the IT front, less so on the bricks and mortar,” Varga said.
Both organizations have flat management structures and are growing, Warner said, so the goal is integration, not necessarily consolidation.
“Teams have really coalesced very nicely,” he said. “The next stage will really be about building relationships.”
