I feel like there must be something I'm missing here. Isn't providing health care the core purpose of a hospital? Why are they outsourcing that? Outsourcing might make sense for ancillary stuff (e.g. running the cafeteria), but I'm confused why they'd look to outsource their core job. And if the outsourcing company can do it so much more efficiently, why don't they just open their own hospitals and take all of the profit?
Think of a doctor as being an specialist independent contractor affiliated with the primary business.
Imagine if you would, a small hospital. They probably don't see enough patients with diagnosis X to keep staff specialized for X busy year round. There is a doctor in town that specializes in X. This doctor needs a place to get their patients stabilized and where the doctor can see the patients periodically. When one of the patients needs hospitalization, the doctor can write an admission order telling the hospital to take care of a patient in a certain way. When somebody comes into the ER and the generalist/hospitalist discovers that person has condition X, then the hospital knows they can call on the doctor to consult with them on how to treat X.
A historical artifact of the hospital/physician relationship is that there are separate billing streams for each side. There is just enough information sharing so that the doctor's billing system knows who the patient is and it is up to the doctor to claim that certain actions were performed for a valid medical reason and documented.
The current state ranges from very arms length relationships to total economic integration, which is rare enough to have a term for it, Single Billing Office.
