At Sunday’s HM19 pre-course “Oh, the Places We’ll Go! Practice Management Tools for Navigating the Changing Role of Your Hospital Medicine Group,” the theme was how to anticipate and embrace changing roles as hospital medicine groups are being asked to take on more responsibility.
Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography
Leslie Flores outlines the day’s schedule during the Sunday practice management pre-course.
“The scope of hospitalist practice is evolving rapidly, both clinically and in terms of all of the other things that hospitalists are being asked to do,” said Leslie Flores, MHA, SFHM, a partner at Nelson Flores Hospital Medicine Consultants, La Quinta, Calif., and course co-director, in an interview before the pre-course. “Our goals with this program are to help leaders position their hospitalist groups for success with this changing environment that they’re living in and the changing roles of hospitalists.”
In an audience poll at the beginning of the pre-course, attendees – a majority of whom were practicing hospitalists and managers of hospitalist groups – said their biggest challenge areas were related to compensation or workflows that have not evolved to match their changing role, and disagreements over who should admit patients.
One of the goals of the session was to give hospitalist leaders ideas to address these issues, which included information on how to implement better team-based care and interdisciplinary care models within their groups, as well as how to adjust their compensation, scheduling, and staffing models to prepare for this “new world of hospitalist medicine,” said Ms. Flores.
Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography
Dr. Rachel Cyrus, Dr. John Nelson (center), and Dr. Mark V. Williams address attendees during the pre-course.
“One of the biggest sources of contention and stress that we see in hospitalist groups is that there’s just so much change, and it’s happening so rapidly, and people are having a hard time really figuring out how to deal with all of that,” she said.
The day began with John Nelson, MD, MHM, outlining the “Trends in Scope of Practice Evolution.” Dr. Nelson, a partner at Nelson Flores Hospital Medicine Consultants, medical director of Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Wash., and course co-director, said hospitalists are increasingly working more in outpatient care, post-acute care, and other specialty facilities. In addition, as group size increases, the likelihood a hospitalist group will be responsible for an observation or short stay unit increases, while a larger group is less likely to have a clinical responsibility for a code blue, cardiac arrest, or rapid response team.
Other topics in the pre-course focused on how to change the culture in a group to an environment where team members are empowered to ask questions or voice concerns, improve patient flow by removing reasons for delays in discharge, recruit the right team members to a group, handle transitions of care, and anticipate change in a group. In addition, the speakers participated in discussions where they shared their biggest successes and failures in practice as leaders and participated in a lightning round where they provided “off-the-cuff” responses to questions from Ms. Flores.
Although hospitalists did not create the current environment that is expanding their role in the health care system, they can position themselves to decide what the scope of their role is, said Dr. Nelson.
“What we should do is navigate our group through these changes in the way that’s going to be most effective for ourselves, the providers in our group, and our organization,” he said. “Those groups that try to dig their heels in or resist all change, they fail. . . and they frustrate themselves. So instead, if you engage in planning for changes in the scope of your practice, you have a chance to make it go the way you’d like it to go, and you’re going to be more satisfied.”