Dr. Goodrich refers to Dr. Conway as a mentor and recalls days when they would “talk about the ways the issues we were working on affect hospitalists and how to make them aware of those issues,” she says. “I found myself drawn like a magnet to the policy stuff, especially during the 2008 election. It finally dawned on me that if I love this so much, why not see if I can make it a career?”
Exciting Times for Public Servants
Dr. Goodrich acknowledges the importance of care transitions and hospital readmissions for the national quality agenda. In fact, while at Yale, she researched care transitions for patients with low health literacy.
“I doubt that any hospitalist would disagree that readmissions are bad for patients, but sometimes they feel like everyone’s looking at them when readmissions happen. As a hospitalist, you know it’s a complex problem, by no means within the control of any single hospitalist,” she says. “But we also know that some hospitals have very low readmission rates. So it can be done, and we need to learn from the high performers.”
Given the current focus on healthcare reform, Dr. Goodrich believes now is an exciting time to be working for the government. She suggests ways that other hospitalists can learn about health policy and participate in its development:
- Get involved in local quality initiatives in the hospital and the community;
- Join SHM’s Public Policy Committee;
- Follow health policy blogs, websites, and other resources offered by HHS, SHM, and private groups such as the Commonwealth Fund; and
- Look into health policy fellowships or training opportunities.
Clinical experience is highly valued throughout CMS, Dr. Conway says, noting Dr. Goodrich’s background as a teaching hospitalist with more than a decade of patient care under her belt.
“In all of CMS, there are less than a hundred physicians in total, and not all of them are still in medical practice. So we have to leverage the clinical skills of that small group. As we develop health policies, that experience gives us a greater understanding of what the policies mean—their potential impact on patients,” he says.
Larry Beresford is a freelance writer based in Oakland, Calif.