Coverage
For many lone hospitalists, sharing schedule coverage is a dilemma. Dr. Li, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston and a board member of SHM, spent one year as a lone hospitalist before another full-timer joined him. “Everybody understands that as sole physician you really can’t be expected to see patients 24/7/365,” says Dr. Li.
Dr. Li’s recommendation for any hospitalist group of any size—but particularly early on when the hospitalist is alone or in a small group—is to match volume with staffing. “With every program that I have seen or been involved with, early on there is always a massive shift of primary care providers who want to refer patients to you after the program is up and running, Dr. Li says.
Another recommendation Dr. Li has for the lone hospitalist is to identify how you will quickly get help in urgent circumstances. “There is a real benefit to the whole service for having more than one physician on any given day,” he says. It takes only one critically ill patient to cause an upheaval in the schedule.
Committee Work
As recent SHM data show, a large proportion of hospitalists serve on hospital committees. But during his year as a lone hospitalist, Dr. Li focused on taking care of patients, relying upon consultants, and getting through the day.
“I certainly had very little insight at that point of the hospitalist model in terms of communications and leading a team and being the leader of quality in the institution,” he says. “Those were the furthest things from my mind.”
Dr. Fulton participated on committees even though he was a lone hospitalist. “I was involved because I was willing to do the extra work and to use that opportunity to educate and establish who we were in the hospital,” he says. When he was joined by his first two partners, he protected them from committee work because that wasn’t their initial responsibility,” he says.
For lone hospitalists, “you either need to anticipate being on committees and protecting time for it, or you need to anticipate protecting yourself from the committees in order to provide your service,” says Dr. Fulton. “That’s sort of a slippery slope because if you lose the opportunity to become involved in committees, someone else will do it and then they’re making decisions for you that affect your practice of medicine in the hospital.”
Because Dr. Fulton would not sit in hourlong meetings, he took an indirect route—discussing issues with case managers on the floors in between patients or when they shared a patient.
Dr. Fulton advises the lone hospitalist to consider “who is boss” when he or she considers allocating time for committee involvement. Employment by a hospital versus a multispecialty group versus going out as a solo practitioner or working in a private group will determine whose agenda you have to fulfill. “If you are owned by the hospital, the hospital calls the shots; and you have to negotiate … where you put your efforts and your service. If they want you to be on committees, you need to negotiate less patient interaction. You can’t do both; you’ll begin to lose your mind.” TH
Andrea Sattinger is a frequent contributor to The Hospitalist.