Alternative Physician Compensation
Qualified employee benefit programs discriminate against highly compensated employees by placing limits on their contributions, payouts, and tax advantages. This makes it difficult to plan an adequate retirement income. The need to recruit and retain physicians has made this issue even more acute for hospitals.
Through effective use of existing tax codes this program is designed to retain and reward physicians as well as other highly compensated employees. Hospitals may use this unique program to tie selected employees and contracted physicians to the hospital, while helping them build their needed retirement program in a tax-advantaged manner.
THASG staff worked with its consultant, Ward Financial Advisory (wholly owned by Wells Fargo), to develop this alternative compensation program for physicians and executives.
340b Retail Pharmacy Program
The 340b Retail Pharmacy Program is the newest Solutions Group venture. This program came about as a result of changes in the 340b regulations that now allow qualified hospitals to contract with outside pharmacies to provide 340b priced drugs to the hospital’s outpatients. Solutions Group has partnered with SUNRx to provide administrative services for this program to member hospitals.
The Signal Alliance, LLC (TSA)
TSA is a purchasing cooperative owned by THA Solutions Group and managed in partnership with MedAssets. TSA was developed several years ago to improve smaller hospital’s ability to leverage volume discounts. TSA facilitates in smaller hospital’s ability to “affiliate” with a larger health system for the purpose of purchasing. This affiliation then allows the smaller hospital to purchase goods and supplies at the larger health system’s prices as opposed to what would be available to them if purchasing only on their own volume. Erlanger Health System serves as the “anchor” member of the cooperative. To date four hospitals participate in TSA.
RevenueRx, LLC
RevenueRx, LLC was developed in partnership with St. Thomas Health System to offer hospitals a unique program to take advantage of many vendors’ willingness to pay for exclusive marketing rights with organizations. Focusing initially on beverages, RevenueRx works with the hospital to identify the financial opportunity and then negotiate very favorable financial arrangements with the bottler. In many cases hospitals can expect to receive in excess of $100,000 per year in exchange for agreeing to exclusively contract with one bottler or the other for marketing purposes.
The Regional Staffing Program of Tennessee (RSPT)
RSPT was developed in cooperation with five other state hospitals associations. It is known by other names in the other states. The South Carolina Hospital Association is the managing partner for this cooperative. RSPT was developed to address the administrative burden created by the use of travel staffing.
THA Pharmacy Benefit Program
The THA Pharmacy Benefit Program was also developed in cooperation with several other state hospital associations. Partnering with ARMSRx, a pharmacy benefit consulting firm, and Express Scripts, Inc. (ESI) the THA Pharmacy Benefit Program leverages the purchasing power offered by multistate participation to drive steep discounts to the hospital.