The hospital-physician relationship: past, present, and future.

The traditional hospital-physician relationship in the United States was an implicit symbiotic collaboration sheltered by financial success. The health care economic challenges of the 1980s and 1990s unmasked the weaknesses of this relationship as hospitals and doctors often found themselves in direct competition in the struggle to maintain revenue. We recount and examine the history of the largely implicit American hospital-physician relationship and propose a means of establishing formal, explicit hospital-physician collaborations focused on delivering quality patient care and ensuring economic viability for both parties. We present the process of planning a joint hospital-physician ambulatory surgery center (ASC) at a not-for-profit academic institution as an example of a collaboration to negotiate a model embraced by both parties. However, the ultimate success of this new center, as measured in quality of patient care and economic viability, has yet to be determined.