The Professional Physicians Association of San Fernando Valley is an organization made up of independent, private practitioners in our medical community. Collectively, we are advocating for and have an interest in preserving and maintaining the high quality of care while promoting excellence in how medicine is delivered.
Part of our organization’s mission is to make private practitioners aware of our new Health Care Reform Act and its impact. We collectively wish to maintain some level of independence and control and advocate for ourselves from the new Accountable Care Organizations that will be contracting medical services on our behalf. Many of us have assumed that we would have continued control over our
Medicare fee-for-service patients, as opposed to Medicare HMO patients. However the creation of ACOs is likely to change this situation. Although ACOs will not become operational until January 1, 2012, most hospitals and some payors are trying to organize ACOs now.
In many ways, ACOs are not very different than past hospital-physician affiliations. For the most part, hospitals have the resources to retain attorneys, consultants, etc., to help create physician-hospital affiliations. As we are all very busy conducting our medical practices, and our medical community lacks a strong physician organization, many physicians have expressed a concern that ACOs and the hospitals will dominate the process. This is not a criticism of ACOs or of Hospitals in general, as this situation is occurring in virtually every medical community in California. In fact, I know that most hospitals welcome the presence of a well-organized physician organization through which they could communicate with all the private practice physicians and through which we could all make good decisions.
Please see our Frequently Asked Questions for more information.
What PPA is not:
- PPA is not set up to be a fully integrated medical group.
- PPA is not going to operate as an Independent Practice Association and contract with HMOs.
- PPA is not a messenger model IPA through which members will evaluate and make decisions on fee-for-service contracts.
- PPA will not bill and collect for physician services.
- PPA may evolve at some point to provide some of the services to its physicians that these entities provide, but PPA’s intent is to create an organization that will be a vehicle through which member physicians will be provided information and a structure through which physician input will be provided.
- PPA will help all of us deal with the developments in our medical community and in medicine at large.