Change Agents
Times of crisis create opportunities for real change. President Obama and many key legislators and thought leaders have signaled a genuine desire to change a system that rewards performance (value-based purchasing) and bundles hospital and physician payments, which will be tied to key outcomes and performance. SHM has been able to show Washington decision-makers that hospitalists can reduce preventable deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in hospitalized patients from 50 per year to three per year. We have shown that hospitalists, using SHM’s BOOST protocols, can improve the discharge process, identify high-risk patients, and reduce ED visits and readmissions. This is just the type of system improvement that leads to better care at a lower cost—the Holy Grail in hard times.
Couple all this with the Institute of Medicine’s call to further reduce residency hours, which only leads to a greater need for hospitalists in teaching institutions, and there is an increasing demand for hospitalists seemingly everywhere. And even in a recession, high demand with a small supply leads to the need to nurture and reward hospitalists, especially those who are experienced and can deliver efficient and effective inpatient care.
At a national level, we will see experimentation with demonstration projects to look at rewarding performance and bundling payments for inpatient care. Similarly, hospitalists should be emboldened to use the current crisis to experiment locally by using teams of hospitalists, nurses, pharmacists, and case managers to revise the way care is delivered. There are opportunities to responsibly involve nurse practitioners and physician assistants as integral parts of your hospitalist team.
While the rest of medicine might be forced to look out for themselves in tough times, hospitalists, by their very positioning, must focus on the survival and improvement of the system, of their hospital, and of the healthcare community. In hospital medicine, we recognize that the days of “Lone Ranger” physicians carving out their own destinies are long gone. In many ways, physicians are intricately intertwined. And that forces us to survive or fail together. That will be hospitalists’ salvation in these hard times: knowing there are better times ahead for us, our hospitals, and our patients. TH
Larry Wellikson is CEO of SHM.