With regard to paying physicians, SHM believes that the Pay for Performance movement is an important step in the right direction. Hospitalists welcome a reimbursement scheme that rewards institutions that follow best practices and achieve superior outcomes.
Audiences for this Supplement
This supplement, How Hospitalists Add Value, has two major audiences. First, hospitalists need to categorize what they can and will do for their hospitals and healthcare communities. They need to understand that this is not voluntary work to be done in their spare time. The provision of these services provides strategic and market benefits to their hospital.
Second, there are hospital administrators and leaders at 1,500 hospitals who have been crucial to growing hospital medicine to more than 12,000 hospitalists. They recognize that hospitalists are core to their future. This supplement will further confirm and document the ways in which hospitalists can help their organizations. The facts put forth in these papers can create a rationale for continued support with dollars and manpower, not as a subsidy but as an intelligent investment for the hospital.
Hospitalists Add Value
- Hospitalists can provide measurable quality improvement through setting standards and compliance.
- Hospitalists can save money and resources by reducing LOS and achieving better utilization.
- Hospitalists can improve the efficiency of the hospital by early discharge, better throughput in the ED, and the opening up of ICU beds.
- Hospitalists can create a seamless continuity from inpatient to outpatient care, from the ED to the floor, and from the ICU to the floor.
- Hospitalists can make other physicians’ lives better and help hospitals to recruit and retain PCPs, surgeons, and specialists.
- Hospitalists can do things other physicians have given up by admitting patients without health insurance or by serving on hospital committees.
- Hospitalists can be instrumental in creating teams of healthcare professionals that make better use of the talent at the hospital and create a better working environment for nurses and others.
- Hospitalists can have a leading role in educating nurses, other hospital staff, and physicals in training.
- And hospitalizes can take care of the acutely ill complex hospitalized patients.
Add it all up and it is clear that hospitalists are a resource to hospitals in meeting the complex challenges of their healthcare communities. Hopefully, this set of important papers will define these issues more clearly and assist hospitalists and their hospital leaders in creating a stable and supportive environment for collaboration that can lead to better healthcare for our patients.