A Score of Success
Twenty years of unbridled growth is great in any business. Put in perspective, the first iPhone, which redefined personal communication, is just nine years old, and already, stock analysts question whether Apple can grow any bigger or if it’s plateaued.
Dr. Nelson
To be sure, the field of HM and its leaders have accomplished more than even Dr. Wachter and Dr. Goldman envisioned 20 summers ago. Much of it may seem so easily established by now, but when pioneering hospitalists John Nelson, MD, MHM, and Winthrop Whitcomb, MD, MHM, founded the National Association of Inpatient Physicians (NAIP) a year after the NEJM paper, they promoted and held a special session at UCSF’s first “Management of the Hospitalized Patient” conference in April 1997.
By 2003, the term “hospitalist” had become ubiquitous enough that NAIP was renamed the Society of Hospital Medicine.
Again, progress followed quickly.
By 2007, SHM had launched Project BOOST (Better Outcomes by Optimizing Safe Transitions), an award-winning mentored-implementation program to reduce LOS, adverse events, and unnecessary 30-day readmissions. Other mentored-implementation programs followed. The Glycemic Control Mentored Implementation (GCMI) program focuses on preventing hypoglycemia, while the Venous Thromboembolism Prevention Collaborative (VTE PC) seeks to give practical assistance on how to reduce blood clots via a VTE prevention program.
In 2012, SHM earned the 2011 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award for Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality at the National Level, thanks to its mentored-implementation programs. SHM was the first professional society to earn the award, bestowed by the National Quality Forum (NQF) and The Joint Commission.
And earlier this year, CMS announced that by this time next year hospitalists would be assigned their own specialty designation code. SHM’s Public Policy Committee lobbied for the move for more than two years.
Dr. Merlino says it’s not just accomplishments that have set the field apart in its first 20 years. It’s the people.
Take Modern Healthcare’s list of the 50 Most Influential Physician Executives and Leaders of 2016. Third on the list is pediatric hospitalist Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, MHM, deputy administrator for innovation and quality and CMS’s chief medical officer. One spot behind him is Dr. Wachter, who in addition to being an architect of the HM movement was the first hospitalist to serve as chair of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine, which provides certification for the majority of working hospitalists.
Dr. Murthy
Rounding out HM’s presence on the list is Vivek Murthy, MD, MBA, a Boston hospitalist and the current U.S. Surgeon General.
“It does demonstrate the emergence of their leadership,” Dr. Merlino says. “I don’t think yet they’re viewed as being the leaders, but I would add to that I don’t think they have yet the respect they deserve for the work they’re doing. When people who have worked with them can understand the value that they bring to clinical care, they clearly view hospitalists as being critical leaders.”
The Future
So what now? For all the talk of SHM’s success, HM’s positive impacts, and the specialty’s rocket growth trajectory, the work isn’t done, industry leaders say.
Hospitalists are not just working toward a more valuable delivery of care, they’re also increasingly viewed as leaders of projects all around the hospital because, well, they are always there, according to Dr. Gandhi.
“Hospitalists really are a leader in the hospital around quality and safety issues because they are there on the wards all the time,” she says. “They really have an interest in being the physician champions around various initiatives, so [in my hospital tenures] I partnered with many of my hospitalist colleagues on ways to improve care, such as test-result management, medication reconciliation, and similar efforts. We often would establish multidisciplinary committees to work on things, and almost always there was a hospitalist who was chairing or co-chairing or participating very actively in that group.”