In November, Barbara Weisenbach took a new job as practice manager for the hospitalist group at Northwest Hospital in Seattle. She’s an experienced administrator but as for hospital medicine, not so much. And she is the group’s first full-fledged practice manager—as in, she’s not a physician taking on admin responsibilities and seeing a partial census.
Barbara Weisenbach
She’s doing a lot of reshaping and a lot of learning, she said, standing outside Room 10 of the San Diego Convention Center, where a daylong pre-course on practice management was being held at SHM’s annual meeting.
“There have been a lot of business things that have been overlooked and not addressed ever before,” she said.
The pre-course, “The Highly Effective Hospital Medicine Group: Using SHM’s Key Characteristics to Drive Performance,” was led by John Nelson, MD, MHM, and Leslie Flores, MHA, SFHM, and offered one useful lesson after another, Weisenbach said.
“One of the most practical portions of the session this morning was about dashboards, which is something I’m currently working on and could definitely use some insight,” Weisenbach said, adding that a list of metrics a dashboard should include and general guidelines on effective dashboards were things she’ll find useful in her own implementation.
The pre-course expanded on the key principles and traits for effective groups, including effective leadership, engaged hospitalists, adequate resources, alignment with the hospital, and care coordination across settings.
Anand Kartha, MD, asks a question during a breakout session
HM16 also included two and a half days of practice management sessions. Plus, management themes were woven through workshops and sprinkled into other sessions.
In one session on handling change, presenters used a surfing analogy: Like a surfer’s intensity just before riding a wave, a laser focus is called for when the moment arrives to execute change.
“Get ready for the ride,” said Steve Behnke, MD, president of Columbus, Ohio–based MedOne Hospital Physicians.
He discussed details of introducing the electronic health record system Epic at their group. There was 18 months of planning involving the practice’s whole operational team, then a doubling of the staffing ratios when the system went live, followed by catered lunches to gather feedback and identify problems.
Presenters emphasized the idea of agility in responding to obstacles and realizing that change affects everyone. Successful change, they said, involves seeing the process from all perspectives and leaders should expect resistance.
“Court them. Listen to them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that,” said Dea Robinson, MA, MedOne’s vice president of operations. “Just listening and giving a platform.”
Back at the pre-course, Dr. Nelson, a hospital medicine consultant, talked about the importance of effective leadership.
Win Whitcomb and John Nelson lead the practice management pre-course.
“An effective group leader is a really key element of a successful group,” said The Hospitalist’s resident practice management columnist. “I’ve worked on-site with many hundreds of hospitalist groups around the country. There’s pretty good correlation between the effectiveness of the leader and the success of the group overall. But a good leader alone is not enough.”
He added that there are too “few leaders to go around.”
A good leader is an active one, he said, adding with funny-because-it’s-true humor that a lot of leaders say their main job is to make the schedule. Good leaders, he said, need to be focused on making the group high-functioning, should be available for administrative work even when not on a clinical shift, and must be able to delegate.