Christine Kneeland—Dr. Kneeland’s mother—said HM leaders tasked with their group’s personnel duties should focus on a few main concepts:
- Think outside the bank. Some physicians look only to earn as much as they can as quickly as they can, but many seek personal and professional satisfaction.
- Engagement is instrumental. A one-day orientation program for a lifetime job doesn’t sound like enough, does it?
In the coming years, hiring managers will have to focus on “millennials”—the generation of doctors born between 1977 and 1999—which Christine Kneeland described as tech-savvy doctors interested in a blended lifestyle of work and leisure. And while some might not agree with or understand their perspective, they’d better get used to it, she said. “The millennials are here, the workplace has changed, and they are leading that change,” she added. “Just embrace it.”
QUALITY
Patient Satisfaction: Tips for Improving Your HCAHPS Scores
MODERATORS: Win Whitcomb, MD, MHM, medical director of healthcare quality, Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, Mass.; Steven Deitelzweig, MD, MMM, SFHM, system chairman, Department of Hospital Medicine, regional vice president of medical affairs, Ochsner Health System, New Orleans
Patient satisfaction scores are a big deal right now, as many HM groups tie the scores to compensation and the federal government tethers the scores and a portion of hospital payment through the value-based purchasing (VBP) program.
So how does a hospitalist improve their HCAHPS score? Here’s what the experts said:
- Personalize things. Give a business card with a picture. Sit down. Smile. Ask the patient if they understand what you’ve said, and don’t get frustrated if they don’t.
- First and last. Make good impressions when introducing yourself to the patient and when it’s time to discharge or transition them to a different facility. “When the hospitalist hands a patient off,” Dr. Whitcomb said, “it doesn’t cut it to pull out your brochure of 40 practitioners when the patient asks, ‘Who am I going to see tomorrow?’”
- Be professional. Don’t vent about workplace issues in front of patients. Dr. Deitelzweig illustrated the point with the case of an elderly patient who got out of bed to help a practitioner they heard complaining about a heavy workload. The patient fell.
- Creative use of white space. Consider using in-room white boards to help keep patients informed of a day’s care plan.
David Jaworski, MD, director of the hospitalist service at Windham Hospital in Willimantic, Conn., says honesty was a key piece of advice he gleaned from the session.
“I think one of the things people appreciate the most when they’re in the hospital is being honest about our uncertainties,” he says. “I have had more people thank me for saying, ‘I don’t know, but we will find out by doing this, this, and this.’ ”
ACADEMIC
The Role of Hospital Medicine in Adapting to the New ACGME Requirements
SPEAKER: Jeff Wiese, MD, FACP, SFHM, associate professor of medicine at Tulane University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans
The new Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) work-hour rules that take effect July 1 have received a lot of attention since they were announced last summer. The guideline that has attracted the bulk of the attention limits intern shifts to 16 hours, with upper-level residents capped at 24 consecutive hours, with four hours of administrative follow-on allowed with the caveat that strategic napping is “strongly suggested.”
“I’m all for work hours,” said Dr. Wiese, immediate past president of SHM. “It’s the right thing to do; it’s safer. But I think we have to be careful we don’t super-fragment the system or double the intensity of the system. And on both of those plates, if you don’t do it right, what you end up with is people who will be ill-prepared.”