How hospitalists at community hospitals can leverage resources from their larger, affiliated academic centers will be discussed Wednesday at 4:20 p.m. at “Hospitalists Affiliated with Academic Centers: Challenges & How to Address Them.”
“In a lot of community hospitals, pediatric units tend to be fairly small,” said copresenter James O’Callaghan, MD, FAAP, SFHM, lead pediatric hospitalist at a community hospital affiliated with Seattle Children’s Hospital. “You may feel you’re a little bit isolated from the main center and a very small piece of the pie. There are sometimes difficulties getting resources or quality work done, partly because, at a community site, you can’t justify spending money for QI [quality improvement] resources or helping the pediatric unit do chart review when they’ve got much bigger fish to fry in the adult world.”
Dr. James O’Callaghan
Dr. O’Callaghan said there are ways “to start leveraging resources at your main site” to help the community site. For example, big academic centers like to have hospitalists in community sites because they can help funnel patients in need of subspecialty care to the main hospital. “That’s one driver on the academic side, but there’s always a little bit of tension with the community site, which wants to keep the patients and keep their beds up.”
During a bed crunch at the main hospital over the winter, he and his colleagues worked to accept some patients from the main hospital because the community site had some open beds.
“It was a win-win arrangement,” he said. “The community site got more patients and filled more beds, and the main hospital was able to free up beds for more patients who were postsurgical or acutely ill.”
Dr. Francisco Alvarez
The session will explore how to balance the interests of both institutions, said copresenter Francisco Alvarez, MD, FAAP, director of the community hospital services division of Children’s National Health System in Washington. The presentation “will describe ways that community-based programs could develop and make a better case for pediatric care improvement by having a clearer understanding of some of the financial and operational motivations of both community and academic settings.”
The talk also will explore benefits such as resources, academic research experience, and the potential to recruit skilled professionals. Dr. Alvarez said, “Affiliated community-based pediatric hospitalist programs have a significant resource advantage for quality and safety initiatives, stemming from the direct affiliation with their tertiary institution that they can use to make significant care improvement within their community.”
“If you are at a single community-based hospital without any larger affiliation, the challenges are bigger because you don’t have extra resources to draw on,” he said.
Community Hospitalists Affiliated with Academic Centers: Challenges & How to Address Them
Wednesday, 4:20–5:20 p.m.
Available via HM17 On Demand