HM groups must then secure buy-in to those guidelines from everyone in the group; from the subspecialists they work with; and from their hospital’s chief medical, financial, and utilization officers.
Care-Transition Guidelines: Opportunity for Hospitalists
A particularly important HM opportunity is improving care transitions. Deficits in communication and information transfer between hospital-based and primary-care physicians (PCPs) are “substantial and ubiquitous,” while delays and omissions are consistently large, and traditional methods of completing and delivering discharge summaries are “suboptimal for communicating timely, accurate, and medically important data to the physicians who will be responsible for follow-up care,” according to a hospitalist-authored Feb. 28, 2007, article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.3 PCPs routinely are not notified about patient admissions or complications during the hospital stay, and some PCPs fail to provide sufficient information to hospitalists at admission, fail to visit or call hospitalized patients, or fail to participate in discharge planning, the study’s researchers noted. For patients with chronic illnesses and frequent hospitalization, those deficits are multiplied, making completeness of information handoffs particularly important.
Because patient handoffs have notoriously been fraught with miscommunication and poor information exchange between providers, adopting a professional consensus on what constitutes the best, safest, and most effective activities during these handoffs is sorely needed.
“Care-transition guidelines can have tremendous power because they affect every hospital patient—each of whom experiences care transitions,” says Rusty Holman, MD, FHM, chief operating officer of Brentwood, Tenn.-based Cogent Healthcare and past president of SHM. “It is an area undergoing rapid development, evolution, and discovery, and hospitalists have positioned themselves as leaders and owners of this particular scenario.”
As care-transition guidelines emerge and mature, Holman thinks they eventually will be tied to value-based healthcare purchasing programs that affect hospitalists’ reimbursement equations and further boost incentives to follow those guidelines. A prime example: Medicare calculated it could save $12 billion annually by reducing preventable 30-day hospital readmissions and will soon stop paying for them. Perhaps 3% to 5% of a hospital’s DRG reimbursement will be at risk under Medicare’s proposal, Dr. Torcson notes.
“Hospitals are going to be much more motivated to build systems and engage physicians, especially hospitalists, to lower readmission rates. Hospitalists will be focusing more and more on how care-transition process improvements can lower those rates,” Dr. Holman says. “That’s a huge opportunity for hospitalists to make a business case for the value they bring to their institutions, and will further justify the financial support they already receive.”
Dr. Ford is more cautious in his appraisal of the financial rewards of better guideline implementation. “We do not capture that much revenue per patient, and even a length-of-stay reduction is difficult for a hospital’s CFO to extrapolate how much money hospitalists save,” he says. “I don’t think hospitalists will be paid more, even if they save the hospital money. You’re just doing your job, but you’re going to keep your job, and you’ll have an enormous bargaining chip when renegotiating contracts with hospitals.”
Still, a prevented readmission might mean a bed for a revenue-generating elective surgery, something that adds to the reward equation.
Guidelines are the foundation for determining best practices. There is no shortage of excellent guidelines, or proof that specific interventions do improve outcomes. The key is achieving more uniform implemenation.
—Patrick Torcson, MD, MMM, FACP, director of hospital medicine, St. Tammany Parish Hospital, Covington, La., SHM Performance and Standards Committee chair
Transition Evolution
SHM and other sources offer physicians and hospitals expert assistance in implementing care-transition guidelines (see “Care-Transition Guidance,” p. 7). The transitions-of-care policy statement jointly issued by the SHM and five other specialty societies further demonstrates that hospitalists play a key leadership role on this front.1