The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Doctor’s Hospital president yesterday said its two-year partnership with the Cleveland Clinic will concentrate on reducing healthcare costs for Bahamian patients as well as improving treatment quality.

Dr Charles Diggis, speaking on a Zoom conference to unveil the two parties' tie-up, said: “Both the Cleveland Clinic and Doctor's Hospital are concerned about the cost. This will be an important topic to patients as well as the payers (insurers), and we're going to pay a lot of attention to how we can control or contain the cost.

"At least hold down the rate of increase in costs, and create ingenious ways that patients can, as a priority, receive care that they need, and we keep the issue of cost appropriately on the back-end.”

The BISX-listed healthcare provider and its Ohio-headquartered counterpart said their partnership will facilitate decisions on which patients can be seen in The Bahamas, and who would be better suited to receive care at the Cleveland Clinic.

Dr Diggis added: “From the Doctor’s Hospital perspective, we’re both in the private space, and so our challenge is going to be - and continues to be - how do we make the care that we provide affordable, and how do we continue to provide that care without having to pay attention at any point to the ability of our patients to pay us.

"Given the fact that we share similar positions and approaches to this, our priority remains appropriate for patients. This relationship affords us the ability to look at how we then can contain the cost of us providing materials; if either of us could reduce costs based on us exploring all aspects of this relationship, reducing our expenses or containing our expenses.

Dr Curtis Rimmerman, Cleveland Clinic's chairman of international operations, elaborated on “value based care", saying: “What we don't want to do is cut costs and also cut quality. First and foremost is to maintain quality, and not compromise patient care whatsoever.

"That's something that we look forward to working with Doctors Hospital on; to see if we can learn from them and they can learn from us, and to see if we can improve outcomes without raising costs and, hopefully, lowering costs.”