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Managed care plans usually arrange discount contracts with hospitals, laboratories and other health care providers. A patient who needs blood work is required to use a plan-approved laboratory. Likewise, a patient who needs the services of a hospital is directed only to hospitals that have discount contracts with the patient’s plan.
Providers are learning that to survive they must be able to deliver the care less expensively and more efficiently. In fact, the need for greater efficiency is a major driving force behind the market place changes in health care delivery.
More medical procedures today are performed on an outpatient basis than ever before, and greater advances in medical technology have facilitated fhis trend. For example, a new non-surgical breast biopsy system at Fauquier Hospital costs about half as much as traditional surgery. The patient is in and out in an hour, requires no costly hospitalization, suffers little or no pain, and requires almost no recovery time.
Most health care plans today carefully dictate how much hospitalization they will allow for various procedures. In the 1950s and 60s a woman might have been hospitalized for a week for delivering a baby. Today health care providers are eager to get women out of the hospital as quickly as possible. A typical hospital stay for an uncomplicated birth is just over 24 hours.
This shift toward minimizing hospitalization has changed the way health care providers do business. Locally, Fauquier
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