Tony Alibrio speaks out on: managed care in hospitals

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 24, 1997

Sparred by the desire of the Clinton administration to revamp the way health care is delivered in this country, hospital chains and insurance providers have worked to reform health care on their own.

The result is being called managed care, and it focuses on prevention rather than on treatment and encourages health-care providers to reduce cut health-care costs.

An outgrowth of managed care is the decision by many hospitals to group together to operate more efficiently and to outsource such nonmedical services as foodservice, housekeeping, patient transport and even parking.

Tony Alibrio, president of Marriott Healthcare Services, talks about bow managed care has affected foodservice.

What has the advent of managed care meant to the health-care industry? We continue to have the greatest health-care system in the world. We have a high degree of technology that can be accessed at a relatively reasonable cost. The single-biggest change under managed care is that an atmosphere has been created where administrators have to set up a health-care business to operate efficiently and compete for patients.

How is that different from the manner in which they operated in the past? Health care is becoming focused more singularly as a single-service business to provide medical care, comfort and support to patients and their families. In this scenario outsourcing becomes more attractive time to focus on their core competencies.

As hospitals get away from running support services, what other changes are occurring? The biggest change has been that more and more hospitals are merging services together. If they are going to outsource, then it makes more sense to bundle all the outsourced services together under one contract.

How can foodservice operators adapt to this new paradigan? You need to set up management a little differently. You need a general manager who knows something about each of the departments involved. You will consolodate services and use employees in a variety of tasks, so you have to have an effective training program in place.

What do foodservice operators have to remember when working in a managed-care environment? They have to place their primary focus on getting back to the basics. Patients are in for a shorter length of time and they are sicker, so their main concern is not menu variety but whether the food is the right temperature and whether it tastes good. At the same time, operators also must look at improving retail operations because that is where they can derive the revenue that will keep them in business.