“If you don’t standardize, the rest is just chaos,” he said. “We have to make it easy to do these things.”
Dr. Meuthing said improving process reliability is key to reducing adverse outcomes, and high reliability organizations have utilized this approach to reduce serious harm events across the 81 SPS hospitals. While prevention of patient harm is the goal, an additional benefit is cost savings. He estimated $27 million of cost savings was realized within SPS network hospitals in 2012-2013.
Oral abstract and conundrum presentations, concurrent with 23 sessions across nine tracks, kept attendees busy. Topics ranged from a PHM circumcision service to decreasing overuse of continuous pulse oximetry. The day’s talks wrapped up with the respective presidents of the meeting’s co-sponsors—the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Pediatrics Association, and SHM—sharing their organizations’ visions of PHM’s future in a town hall format.
The second full day began with an update of the Joint Council of Pediatric Hospital Medicine’s efforts to further advance PHM as a field. The process of submitting a petition to the American Board of Pediatrics was reviewed, as were the current status and time course of the move toward Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education certification.
After lunch, the highly anticipated “Top Articles” session was presented by Robert Dudas, MD, medical director of the pediatric hospitalist program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, and Karen Wilson, MD, MPH, section head for pediatric hospital medicine at Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora. The presenters reviewed literature from the past year on topics ranging from nebulized hypertonic saline for bronchiolitis to antibiotic prophylaxis in vesicoureteral reflux.
The final day commenced with a talk by Alberto Puig, MD, PhD, FACP, associate director of undergraduate education at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, whose experiences as an internist provided insight regarding the history of the physical examination, from the aphorisms of Hippocrates to the family-centered bedside rounding of today.
Dr. Chang is associate clinical professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine and a hospitalist at both UCSD Medical Center and Rady Children’s Hospital. He is pediatric editor of The Hospitalist.
Dr. O’Callaghan is a clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and a member of Team Hospitalist.
Dr. Hale is a past member of Team Hospitalist and a pediatric hospitalist at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.
Dr. Pressel is a pediatric hospitalist and inpatient medical director at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., and a member of Team Hospitalist.