As a hospital administrator, you receive a call from a colleague at another hospital. Your colleague, who is a friend, informs you that he has received a demand for a stipend from the ophthalmologists who take ED calls at his hospital, and they want a sizable raise. He asks you what you pay for that type of call and suggests that you could both benefit by coming up with a standard rate of pay over which neither of you will go in response to physician demands. It could
save your hospital $300,000 to do this. What is your response, and what is the rationale for it?
A colleague working in another hospital also is my friend, and I think it is normal to share the information and what’s happened in the hospitals we work at. I would share with my friend our pay for our ophthalmologists who take ED calls as the rate could be easily found. However, I would not accept the suggestion my friend gave. First of all, I could not be the one to make any decision like it as it has to go through the meeting with all the board members and HR. Second, as Steren (2019) discussed in his article, sharing information between competitors can create potential benefits for the competition, but as my friend mentioned, both hospitals already agreed to reject the raise under the table is a violation of anti-trust.
Steren, J. E. (2019). Antitrust Compliance and Exchanges of Competitively Sensitive Information. Journal of Health Care Compliance
. https://web-p-ebscohost-
com.lopes.idm.oclc.org/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=a622cd5f-1918-43d0-91d2-
688dbc46d278%40redis
