All Entries in the "practitioners (general)" Category
Poll question: Does your organization have different controlled substance screening requirements for contracted practitioners versus non-contracted practitioners (i.e. traditional medical staff members)?
How does your organization compare to others? Take our poll below to find out.
Poll question: Does your medical staff and/or hospital screen for controlled substances?
How does your organization compare to others? Take our poll below to find out.
National Nurse Practitioner Week highlights primary care shortage
If you haven’t already heard about it from the nurse practitioners (NP) at your organization, this week is National Nurse Practitioner (NP) Week. NPs are harnessing their spotlight to shine the light on the shortage of primary care providers in America—and how their work force can help combat that shortage.
The theme for the week is “Nurse Practitioners – 125,000 Solutions to the Primary Care Shortage.” The American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) offers a resource guide on its Web site explaining why this year’s theme was chosen.
“The shortage of primary care providers is a hot topic in the healthcare reform debate. NP Week is a good opportunity to showcase the many ways that NPs are the primary care providers of choice for many patients and to let others in your community know about the value of NP-delivered primary care,” the AANP states.
Be sure to wish the NPs on your medical staff a happy National Nurse Practitioner’s Week!
Contest entry: Note-taking form
Happy Free Form Friday! Here’s another great form that came in for The Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium contest.
Tommie Cooper, CPMSM, director of medical staff services at Sky Ridge Medical Center, developed this clever note-taking form for physicians. To prevent them from inadvertently walking away with documents that shouldn’t leave the meeting room, Tommie prints them on colored paper (a different color for every month) so that everyone is aware of what documents are coming and going.
Thanks for sharing, Tommie! You can download the note-taking form (Word doc.) here .
Remember, there’s still time to submit your contest entries to win two free seats to The Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium. Find contest details here!
Contest entry: Disruptive physician policy
It’s an issue every institution unfortunately has to deal with – disruptive physicians.
Debi Davis, CPMSM, director of medical staff services at Cumberland Medical Center, sent in this disruptive physician policy to share with others as part of her entry into The Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium contest.
You can download the disruptive physician policy (Word doc.) here.
There’s still time to submit your best practices, tools, or tips to win two free seats to The Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium contest.
The aging physician: Balancing safety, respect, and dignity
Physicians often enter their 60s practicing medicine full time, but as they inch their way toward 70, many start making significant adjustments to their schedules and scope of practice. Most of us acknowledge the affect aging has on our cognitive and motor skills, with the help of some not-so-subtle hints from our colleagues and loved ones. For some, it’s no big deal—there are so many ways to earn a livelihood inside and outside the healthcare profession that it seems fruitless to hold onto things that may no longer fit our professional goals, such as inpatient privileges. They gladly move into the ambulatory setting and are often relieved to enter a different phase of their professional lives. For others, however, this transition is not easy, and it may require the guidance and support of peers. For this reason, it is important for medical staff leaders to understand how to support and respect long serving colleagues while ensuring that patients are not inadvertently placed in jeopardy.
When I entered the practice of emergency medicine 30 years ago, there were always one or two physicians in their 80s who refused to give up their practices. More than once, I followed a physician suffering from dementia on his or her on rounds to discretely modify orders at the request and relief of the nursing staff. Some of the orders required minimal modification and some were lethal doses of inappropriate agents that the nursing staff had no intent of carrying out. This was our tradition—to support our loyal colleagues who had served their communities for decades, despite that we all knew this was not the right thing to do.
Contest entry: Go green and improve patient safety
Jenna Duch, medical staff coordinator at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio, submitted a suggestion to the Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium contest that we wanted to share because it will help save the environment. Duch puts all of the medical staff orientation materials onto a USB key rather than stuffing several trees’ worth of paper into cumbersome binders. She includes hyperlinks on the agenda page to guide medical staff members through all of the documents and help them find specific information.
“Now, we don’t have to print binders with copies of all the material included, such as bylaws, rules, regs, staff roster, etc. Think of the money and time we save by simply dropping electronic files on a drive instead of printing binder after binder. And the new provider gets a free USB key to use whenever and for whatever. So far, we like how this is going,” Duch writes.
Duch adds that the medical staff puts patient safety first by requiring new providers to participate in a safety-focused medical staff orientation within the first year of their appointment. They cannot reapply if they do not attend. “We want to ensure that our patients are treated the best, so setting the bar high from the beginning is what we hope to do.”
Thanks for the suggestion Jenna! Keep those entries coming!
To learn more about how you can win two free seats to the Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium, click here.
Contest entry: Share patient comments with physicians
Here’s another great contest entry tip about sharing patient satisfaction information.
Denise Rollins, RHIA, director of medical staff services at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, CA, says that not all patient feedback comes in the form of data.
Mission Hospital, who subscribes to Avatar, an organization that administers patient satisfaction surveys, collects the handwritten comments from patients and shares that information with the physicians at the annual medical staff meeting.
Denise says,
“Some patients take the time to acknowledge staff for making a difference during their hospitalization. All handwritten comments are forwarded to the hospital. Any comment that mentions a specific physician is shared with the physician by letter sent to his/her home address and a copy is placed in his/her credential file as evidence of skill, knowledge, interpersonal relations, etc., for consideration at the time of reappointment.
Annually, in December at the annual medical staff meeting, a power point presentation of all comments received during the year is shared. The presentation starts running 90 minutes prior to the start of the meeting. Last year we acknowledged over 150 physicians for the “sacred encounters” with our patients. The feedback we received from our physicians was very positive.”
Thanks for the tip!
Keep those contest entries coming, and you could win the free registration to The Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium (Nov. 8-9, Naples, Fl)!
We’ll share the entries on the blog and select the best one at the end of the month.
To enter the drawing, submit your best practice, tool, or tip to us. Find more details here!
Greeley Medical Staff Institute contest entry
Thanks to Mary Jo Hallaert, RN, BSN, CPHQ, quality resource specialist at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, CO, for sending in this great suggestion regarding physician peer review. When her organization reorganized its peer review program, physician reviewers requested broader access to peer review materials to help them meet their timelines. The quality resources department developed several customer defined screens within the Meditech system to accommodate this request.
She writes:
“While we continue to tweak the system to help physicians review efficiently, entering information in the computer for case review has enhanced our reporting options for OPPE, FPPE, and other physician quality committee needs.”
Click here to see the two screens that physicians can access to answer questions related to their peer case reviews. Physicians enter the module using an assigned password and find the cases that they are assigned to. Case history notes are available to read, as well as access to the whole peer review record. Physicians can move in and out of the case records as needed, and still return to the review categories and text boxes to document their findings and choose their dispositions.
Mary Jo explains that at committee meetings, worksheets can be downloaded for discussion, and at the end of the quarter, the peer review committee can generate reports, such as cases per physicians, categories, dispositions, system improvements identified, and reviewer comments.
Thanks for sharing such a great idea with us, Mary Jo!
The link between hospitalists and quality
A recently study shows that hospitalists improve the quality of care delivered in hospitals, but do they really improve the care? That’s the question being asked on The Wall Street Journal Health Blog. (Be sure to read the comments below the original post for perspectives from the field, too.)
The Archives of Internal Medicine published study finds that these practitioners “may contribute to improved quality of care for patients with common inpatient diagnoses.” But critics are quick to point out that hospitalists typically work at large, academic medical centers and there may be other reasons for the high quality delivery of care at those organizations.
Does your hospital employ hospitalists? If so, how well do they interact with the rest of the medical staff? Do you think they contribute more to quality care than medical staff members?
Check out our Hospitalist Leadership blog for more hospitalist news. http://blogs.hcpro.com/hospitalist