Gary Brock is president and chief operating officer of the North Texas Division of Baylor Scott & White Health. Brock will continue to provide critical operational strategy and oversight for the entire Baylor Scott & White North Texas operation.
His responsibilities include leadership of dozens of owned, leased and affiliated hospitals and outpatient centers located throughout North Texas as well as hundreds of Baylor’s HealthTexas Provider Network (HTPN) physician clinics. Brock has held executive leadership roles at Baylor since 1991, and since 2005, has served as chief operating officer for Baylor Health Care System. He recently shared his thoughts on the system’s future strategy.
- On creating Baylor Scott & White Quality Alliance (BSWQA). the system’s accountable care organization (ACO): “In the U.S., we are going through a cultural change. What’s being asked of us (as a health system) is to get involved in improving population health and reducing the cost of health care. Traditionally, we (at Baylor) have just been a hospital provider. Now we need to integrate across the full continuum of care. That includes post-acute care, as well as acute care. That has traditionally been siloed, which created gaps in care. We now take the different components and connect them.”
- On the new role of physicians in an ACO: “Physicians didn’t take an oath to be responsible for the cost of care. It was their job to do everything they could to take care of patients. If you are in the Baylor Scott & White Quality Alliance, we are asking you to help us be responsible for the cost of care.”
- On Baylor Scott & White Health’s (BSWH) strategy: “We are blessed to be in Dallas-Fort Worth. We add 200,000 people a year. What we have to do is eliminate unnecessary hospital admissions and get patients to the right site of care. As this new population seeks care, we need to create a more attractive health system. It is about access, access, access. Can I get them to our primary-care clinics and tie them into our system?”
- On narrow provider networks: “We provide care, but we buy care too (as an employer, and the system was BSWQA’s first customer). BSWQA drove down our costs. Employers are really interested in doing this, but they are more concerned about narrow networks. We were, too. We set up phone lines to deal with (employee) pushback (over the narrower BSWQA network). After two weeks, we were getting nothing.”
- On the role of the Scott & White Health Plan, which is expanding to North Texas in 2015: “We are trying to take all of the utilization management and embed that in the BSWQA. The health plan would only be the marketing and financing arm. That is where the rub has been. Health plans were trying to run things. If we have connectivity, then we don’t have to be burdened by prior (utilization) approval. Medical management embedded in BSWQA.”
- On U.S. hospital consolidation: “In the future, there will be only about 60-100 U.S. health systems. We are the largest in Texas. There are only about 250 U.S. health systems right now. Many of the 5,000 U.S. hospitals already are part of systems. There will be more consolidation, but I think you are going to see more service line aggregators. Cleveland Clinic is aggregating in cardiovascular (and Baylor Scott & White Health is one of its partners). They don’t have capital to go into all the major U.S. markets.”
