BWPO Takes Shape- BWH Bulletin - For and about the People of Brigham and Women's Hospital
BWPO Takes Shape- BWH Bulletin - For and about the People of Brigham and Women's Hospital
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May 22, 2000
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In This Issue:
BWPO Takes Shape
Hospital Reimbursements
Pike Notes
JCAHO Mock Survey
Domestic Violence Awareness
The New England Journal of Medicine
CIMIT
Honoring BWH Nurses
At the top of NIH research funding
Now that the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization (BWPO) has been approved by all departments, its governing body, the BWPO Board, led by Chairman Lawrence Cohn, MD, chief, Cardiac Surgery, will have an organizing meeting on May 24. “The board’s contracts committee, composed of physicians, will begin to evaluate the current Blue Cross Blue Shield contract negotiations, thereby directly addressing physician fee schedules as its first order of business,” said Cohn. Joining Cohn on the BWPO Board are Robert Handin, MD; Victor Dzau, MD; Michael Zinner, MD; David Sugarbaker, MD; Ramzi Cotran, MD; Simon Gelman, MD, PhD; Robert Barbieri, MD; Thomas Thornhill, MD; and Steven Seltzer, MD. Physicians from Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Orthopedics will be elected to the board soon. Ron Walls, MD, Martin Samuels, MD, and Jonathan, Borus, MD are non-voting members, as will be physicians from Pathology and Radiology. A primary care physician will also be appointed, and five lay trustees have been named. Jeffrey Otten, BWH President, Troy Brennan, MD, BWPO president, and Anthony Whittemore, MD, Chief Medical Officer, round out the board. Two other milestones in the BWPO’s development will be the move to a newly renovated central location at 111 Cypress Street in Brookline in mid-June and the conversion to a single, state-of-the-art IDX billing system on July 1, 2000. The new billing operation leaves control of day-to-day operations in the hands of the departments, so as to ensure accountability, but consolidates the business operations in one location to gain efficiency. The organization itself creates certain cooperative business relationships between Brigham and Women’s physicians and Massachusetts General Hospital physicians and allows BWH physicians to join the other economically integrated Partners physicians to negotiate all contracts with third-party payors.