Recent Articles
9/11: A remembrance
By Richard Rohr, MD, MMM, FACP, FHM
I had not planned to write about this, but seeing the 9/11 memorials this morning brought back some memories.
At 8 a.m. on September 11, 2001 we convened a meeting of the Department of Medicine at Milford Hospital in Milford, CT. The major topic of discussion was whether or not hospitalists should have full membership and privileges in the department. I had been hired several years earlier as a “daytime house physician” (Bob Wachter had not yet told us what a hospitalist was), and we had recently recruited full-time physicians to replace moonlighting cardiology fellows from Yale who had provided night coverage for many years. We were ready to launch a full-service hospitalist program, but there were still many members of the private medical staff who saw this as a way for the hospital to diminish the physicians’ control. It was a more contentious meeting than usual, and I recall that the privileges were approved by a single vote.
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Contest entry: Hospital quality summit
Here’s another helpful hint about quality from one contest entry submission.
Director of Quality, Rosemary O’Gara, RN, CPHQ, CPHRM, of East Orange General Hospital developed a nursing quality summit, which is a monthly meeting in which managers address quality variances in the same way that budget variances are discussed and reviewed.
At the meeting, they review the following items:
- Falls
- Restraints
- Pressure ulcers
- Pain managements
- Medication reconciliation
Rosemary says, ”Quality outcomes have significantly improved since inception of the summit in September 2008.”
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!
Contest entry: Physician hotline for patient and physician satisfaction
Keeping patients and physicians happy sometimes requires some creative thinking. We liked this tip that came from Gloria Ziegler, CPCS, medical staff services director of Val Verde Regional Medical Center.
Gloria says that her institution strives to improve patient and physician satisfaction. How do they accomplish that goal?
The Val Verde Regional Medical Center currently uses a physician hotline for physicians to call reference any complaints, praises, or new ideas that might be helpful in improving patient/physician satisfaction.
She says,
“We also have established a patient/customer hot line to deal with any concerns that our community might have dealing with their care at our facility. Our administration works extra hard to assure that anyone having concerns or issues which need to be resolved are addressed in a timely manner. We are the only facility in town within a 300-mile radius and must work extra hard to keep our patients from going to San Antonio or San Angelo for care.”
Thanks for sharing!
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!
Contest entry: Hospitalist and ED communication
Keep those contest entries coming, and you could win the free registration to The Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium (Nov. 8-9, Naples, Fl)!
Here is one helpful tip from David L. Hoff, CEO of Wayne Memorial Hospital in Honesdale, PA about using electronic communication between hospitalists and the emergency department:
“Our hospital has begun to role out CPOE. The best place to start is with the ER doctors since they interface with the hospitalists very frequently on admission decisions. We have found having CPOE in the ER has resulted in much better communication between the ER doctors and the hospitalists on patient management decisions and has reduced the time for admissions orders.”
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!
Cartoon: September 2009
"If you can manage 16 patients in one day, how many can you see during the overnight shift?" (Illustration / HCPro, Inc.)
If you’d like more, click on the tag, “Cartoons” for our illustration archives.
What should the goals of hospitalist palliative care team be?
While I was doing some research for an upcoming article on palliative hospitalists, I looked back at some of the literature on these specialty hospitalists.
As the population ages, the burden on hospitalists to provide effective care to patients with chronic illness increases. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the population of adults 65+ will grow by approximately 50% by the year 2020.
Q&A: Do specialty hospitalists have a future in practice or will the trend fade out?
A new book just arrived on my desk, Emergency Department On-Call Strategies: Solutions for Physician-Hospital Alignment, Second Edition, and I'm pleased to share a bit from the book about specialty hospitalists.
A lot of people wonder about the 'ist movement and whether it has staying power.
Q: Do specialty hosptialists have a future in practice or will the trend fade out?
A: Yes, as emergency department (ED) call panel stipends reach high enough levels, hospitals are taking a page from internal medicine hospitalist programs and applying it to other specialties on call. Stipend payments are escalating beyond belief, and it is common to find hospitals paying $8 million to $10 million per year for ED call coverage stipends. Now, a new breed of specialist is in the ranks of internal medicine:
The southern twang of hospitalists: Why so many hospitalists hail from the South
I often tell other editors (who are typically in the New England offices) that I like interviewing hospitalists, mostly for their southern accents! Obviously, I kid, but that does pose an interesting question as to why many in southern states dedicate themselves to inpatient medicine.
According to a recent Archives of Internal Medicine study, “Hospitalists and the Quality of Care in Hospitals,” most hospitals that utilized hospitalists were located in the southern U.S. states in large metropolitan areas. They tended to be large, private, not-for-profit, teaching institutions. Here’s the breakdown by region, according to the study:
Hospitals with hospitalists:
- South 39.2%
- Midwest 21.8%
- West 20.6%
- Northeast 18.5%
Contest winner: Physician reappointment tools
Thank you to all the readers for their great work and entries submitted for the August giveaway for two free seats at the Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium (November 8-9, Naples, Fl).
July’s giveaway went to Nancy Bertling, RN, MBA, quality manager of TOPS Surgical Specialty Hospital in Houston, TX for submitting a physician report card for quality and re-credentialing.
This time, August’s giveaway goes to Lana Heavilin, RN, a medical staff office coordinator in the quality department of Holland Hospital, in MI. Lana submitted tools for physician reappointment.
Are concierge hospitalists coming?
I recently had the opportunity to have lunch with a member of the board of directors of a company called MDVIP and was fascinated by their business model. MDVIP helps primary care physicians transition from a traditional practice model to a concierge practice. This company was featured in a recent article on CNNmoney.com.
Here are some of the basics of MDVIP as I understand them:
- The patient pays an annual retainer of approx. $1,500 or $125 per month
- The practice limits the number of patients to between 300—600
- The physician is accessible to any patient around the clock by cell phone and will even meet the patient in the emergency room when an emergency arises
- The patient keeps his or her health insurance in place
- The patient must take an annual “Mayo Clinic” level physical, and the practice focuses on wellness and prevention
What’s the number one duty of a hospitalist? Patient safety?
When Robert M. Centor, MD, did his morning rounds, he found one patient named Jones in one room, and another patient also named Jones in the next room. That was a mistake waiting to happen, said Centor, associate dean for the Huntsville Regional Medical Campus of the University of Alabama, School of Medicine, in Birmingham, in an interview with HealthLeaders Media I conducted last week.
That’s where the true value of the hospitalist comes in.
“Hospitalists will help the C-suite improve patient safety,” said Centor, who is the voice behind the DB’s Medical Rants blog. Given that hospitalists practically live in the hospital, they are the go-to people for consistency of care and operations.
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Wherefore art thou tort reform?
By Kirk Mathews, MBA
The more I hear about healthcare reform or “health insurance reform,” the less I hear about tort reform and the more crazed I become! I have written before (Can real health reform happen without tort reform?) about the added costs from defensive medicine. So I nearly blew a gasket, when driving down the interstate recently, I spotted a billboard that read something like this:
Have you ever had Tendonitis? Ever had problems with your Achilles tendon? Ever taken Levaquin? Then call Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe so we can sue on your behalf!
