Q: It sounds like you’re seeing patients less and doing more what you consider “population health.” How has your experience as a hospitalist helped you in your new position?
A: All of the committee work that I did set the tone for these changes in my career. And that committee work included committee work in my practice, committee work at the hospital, committee work in national organizations, such as SHM and the American College of Physicians.
Q: When you speak about population health, what types of problems and solutions are you looking at?
A: It’s important to recognize that healthcare is only a small part of population health. Now, understanding the other side of social issues that impact our patients, you can bring to them the best healthcare possible, but if we don’t address those other needs or at least recognize them and steer them to a place where they help them with those needs, our care will not be as meaningful as we hope.
Q: Can you give an example?
A: The asthmatic who’s in your ED four times a year and gets excellent care but gets discharged home with an inability to get their medicine or to take their medicines appropriately or to reduce an environmental exposure that keeps triggering the asthmatic exacerbations. These are all the things that population health must now consider. We cannot confine ourselves simply to what we do behind closed doors of the office or within the four walls of a hospital.
Q: How much of your new job is the offspring of regulations coming down the pipe from healthcare reform?
A: Not so much because of the regulations. The changes we are seeing are driven by the market, driven by employers, and by states. Yes, the Affordable Care Act has an impact, but hopefully only to accelerate changes that we already saw taking shape. Our hope is to create a system that will provide that help to the individual and help the population to do that or reduce per-capita cost, but also by enriching the lives of providers and, of course, doing this before the regulations tell us how before someone tells us how to do it.
Q: As a former chief resident, what advice do you have for trainees entering into a new paradigm of medicine?
A: They should consider the population and not just the individual. They should consider the model wellness and not just illness to focus on in an acute-care setting. They should be trained and well-prepared. This is what hospitalist medicine does quite well: to continuously look at quality improvement and PDSA [Plan-Do-Study-Act] cycles. It should be common that they are reviewing quality metrics and planning on how they can get better as a group or even as an individual in a practice and the concept of team medicine.
Q: What is the biggest challenge hospitalists face today?
A: We need to be better versed in the change equation, how to manage change. That’s the biggest challenge.
Q: Tell me about your work with SHM. What does the society mean to you?
A: The society has really helped me understand the process in managing change, in quality-improvement cycles. Having participated in one of the mentored implementation programs [Project BOOST], I was afforded an opportunity to be coached by experts in the field. The toolkits on the SHM website I found very helpful. It was a mini-fellowship, if you will. If I didn’t take the interest that I have in SHM, I don’t think I would have either known the opportunities I have or availed myself of all the opportunities SHM can provide.