Larry Wellikson, MD, FHM

While most of the focus has been on D.C. and the trillions of dollars to be spent on healthcare reform, HM has grown substantially in the last decade without any significant payment reform or new regulation. This is all the more incredible because the rise of HM has involved two institutions not synonymous with accepting or adapting to change: physicians and hospitals.

In the coming years, hospitals face important challenges, including their fiscal survival, public trust, workforce shortages, difficulty deciding whether their physicians are partners or competitors, and figuring out what to do about all this patient safety and performance improvement hubbub.

Although 2010’s version of healthcare reform will be about increasing access (see “An Imperfect Solution,” January 2010, p. 44), there are still the seeds planted to address the next two pillars of reform: reducing cost and rewarding performance. Together, they create the value proposition in healthcare. All this will make the coming decade one in which the hospital as an institution will need to evolve and adapt if it is to survive.

What is Quality?

As we enter a transitional phase, in some ways, we aren’t even clear on just what quality healthcare is:

• Is quality defined as a payment issue? We see this in discussions of not paying for “never events” or denying payment for readmissions.
• Is quality about being more satisfied? This is found in emphasis on the surveys of patient and family satisfaction that drive hospital CEO compensation and bonuses, as well as in efforts to improve staff retention or in recognition by business, insurers, and government.
• Is quality just checking things off on a clipboard? We all see the endless list of quality measures and increasing documentation that providers have told their patients to stop smoking or get a flu shot, but is that really the quality we are seeking in healthcare?
• Is quality just avoiding embarrassment? Is the best driver of performance improvement outraged hospital trustees wielding printouts comparing hospitals?

We do know that in some ways, the discussion at most of our hospitals has shifted from “Is quality important?” to “How do we do it?” And in this discussion, HM and SHM have taken a leading role in the “solutions” to the problem. Our innovative programs help reduce unnecessary DVTs, improve glycemic control, and refine the discharge process (see Project BOOST) for better patient/family satisfaction, reduced ED visits, and reduced readmissions.

New Ways to Deliver Care

The hospital of the future—I’m talking 2020—will not be defined by bricks and walls. The hospital stay will not end with a patient in a wheelchair being helped into their car. We already know that most patients don’t leave the hospital cured, but are discharged when they are not sick enough to need to stay recumbent in the most expensive hotel in the city. Often these patients are in midcourse of an acute illness, frequently imposed on top of chronic dysfunctions.

While the patient as the true “medical home” for their health and illness have always borne the potholes of slipped handoffs and information transfer deficits, hospitalists now have a clear view of the precarious nature of post-discharge care. Bundling and payment reform, designed to reward coordination of care and the reduction of readmissions to the ED, might be a revenue-driven boost to our ill-designed healthcare system, but the hospital, with the help of their hospitalists, can take the lead in fixing these problems. And we don’t have to wait for payment reform.

The good news is we aren’t alone in our efforts to change the culture, even the mission, of our hospitals. In a time of healthcarewide workforce shortages, there are increasing demands for direct inpatient care, coupled with the added time needed to document current performance and train and implement needed improvements. The only way to meet all of the volume and performance demands is with process change. We need a different way to deliver care to hospitalized patients.

All-Star Teams

High-performing organizations are composed of high-performance teams and a set of operating principles that create a widespread culture of motivated individuals who are focused on metrics, are execution-driven, and are committed to continual improvement and rapid adaptation.

The characteristics of high-performance teams are that they:

• Self-correct and reallocate resources;
• Have clear roles and responsibilities;
• Have clear, valued, and shared visions;
• Have strong team leadership;
• Develop a strong sense of “collective” trust and confidence; and
• Manage and optimize performance outcomes.

SHM has taken the lead at a national level in helping to organize the Hospital Care Collaborative (HCC), which is made up of CEOs and leaders in nursing, pharmacy, case management, social workers, and respiratory therapy. The HCC has published a set of “Common Principles” (see “Common Principles for the Hospital Care Collaborative”) and is planning to develop practical strategies for building high-performance teams at our nation’s hospitals.

SHM recently received support from Ortho-McNeil and has created a partnership with the American Hospital Association, American Organization of Nurse Executives, and American College of Physician Executives to develop principles and strategies to implement high-performance teams and to use this as a springboard to look at hospital care in the broadest sense (including transfers with medical home and accountable-care organizations). To start, SHM has convened a blue-ribbon group of hospital CMOs, CQOs, nursing executives, and other leaders in the hospital C-suite. Former SHM president Pat Cawley, MD, MBA, FHM, assistant professor and executive medical officer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, will chair this effort.

In these two initiatives, SHM and national hospital leaders are providing direction and innovation at two entry points—the C-suite and executive team—as well as on the front lines with the other healthcare professionals who care for our nation’s hospitalized patients.

More to Come

HM has had an interesting decade, growing to more than 30,000 hospitalists now practicing in 75% of our nation’s hospitals. We’ve taken on comanagement and are providing real success as change agents. But the decade to come will see the reinvention of our nation’s hospitals and distinct changes in workflow and responsibilities. We are moving from care based on the unit of the visit or the procedure to episodes of care. We are moving from a system that rewards just doing something to one that rewards doing the correct thing and doing it well. We are moving our hospitals from a swap meet where each physician has a booth and everyone supports those individual efforts to an institution with a culture that is patient-centered, based on quality measurement and performance, and provides care delivered by teams of health professionals working in concert.

This is a world that hospitalists can thrive in and, with your help and direction, SHM will provide the tools along the way. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

While most of the focus has been on D.C. and the trillions of dollars to be spent on healthcare reform, HM has grown substantially in the last decade without any significant payment reform or new regulation. This is all the more incredible because the rise of HM has involved two institutions not synonymous with accepting or adapting to change: physicians and hospitals.

In the coming years, hospitals face important challenges, including their fiscal survival, public trust, workforce shortages, difficulty deciding whether their physicians are partners or competitors, and figuring out what to do about all this patient safety and performance improvement hubbub.

Although 2010’s version of healthcare reform will be about increasing access (see “An Imperfect Solution,” January 2010, p. 44), there are still the seeds planted to address the next two pillars of reform: reducing cost and rewarding performance. Together, they create the value proposition in healthcare. All this will make the coming decade one in which the hospital as an institution will need to evolve and adapt if it is to survive.

What is Quality?

As we enter a transitional phase, in some ways, we aren’t even clear on just what quality healthcare is:

• Is quality defined as a payment issue? We see this in discussions of not paying for “never events” or denying payment for readmissions.
• Is quality about being more satisfied? This is found in emphasis on the surveys of patient and family satisfaction that drive hospital CEO compensation and bonuses, as well as in efforts to improve staff retention or in recognition by business, insurers, and government.
• Is quality just checking things off on a clipboard? We all see the endless list of quality measures and increasing documentation that providers have told their patients to stop smoking or get a flu shot, but is that really the quality we are seeking in healthcare?
• Is quality just avoiding embarrassment? Is the best driver of performance improvement outraged hospital trustees wielding printouts comparing hospitals?

We do know that in some ways, the discussion at most of our hospitals has shifted from “Is quality important?” to “How do we do it?” And in this discussion, HM and SHM have taken a leading role in the “solutions” to the problem. Our innovative programs help reduce unnecessary DVTs, improve glycemic control, and refine the discharge process (see Project BOOST) for better patient/family satisfaction, reduced ED visits, and reduced readmissions.

New Ways to Deliver Care

The hospital of the future—I’m talking 2020—will not be defined by bricks and walls. The hospital stay will not end with a patient in a wheelchair being helped into their car. We already know that most patients don’t leave the hospital cured, but are discharged when they are not sick enough to need to stay recumbent in the most expensive hotel in the city. Often these patients are in midcourse of an acute illness, frequently imposed on top of chronic dysfunctions.

While the patient as the true “medical home” for their health and illness have always borne the potholes of slipped handoffs and information transfer deficits, hospitalists now have a clear view of the precarious nature of post-discharge care. Bundling and payment reform, designed to reward coordination of care and the reduction of readmissions to the ED, might be a revenue-driven boost to our ill-designed healthcare system, but the hospital, with the help of their hospitalists, can take the lead in fixing these problems. And we don’t have to wait for payment reform.

The good news is we aren’t alone in our efforts to change the culture, even the mission, of our hospitals. In a time of healthcarewide workforce shortages, there are increasing demands for direct inpatient care, coupled with the added time needed to document current performance and train and implement needed improvements. The only way to meet all of the volume and performance demands is with process change. We need a different way to deliver care to hospitalized patients.

All-Star Teams

High-performing organizations are composed of high-performance teams and a set of operating principles that create a widespread culture of motivated individuals who are focused on metrics, are execution-driven, and are committed to continual improvement and rapid adaptation.

The characteristics of high-performance teams are that they:

• Self-correct and reallocate resources;
• Have clear roles and responsibilities;
• Have clear, valued, and shared visions;
• Have strong team leadership;
• Develop a strong sense of “collective” trust and confidence; and
• Manage and optimize performance outcomes.

SHM has taken the lead at a national level in helping to organize the Hospital Care Collaborative (HCC), which is made up of CEOs and leaders in nursing, pharmacy, case management, social workers, and respiratory therapy. The HCC has published a set of “Common Principles” (see “Common Principles for the Hospital Care Collaborative”) and is planning to develop practical strategies for building high-performance teams at our nation’s hospitals.

SHM recently received support from Ortho-McNeil and has created a partnership with the American Hospital Association, American Organization of Nurse Executives, and American College of Physician Executives to develop principles and strategies to implement high-performance teams and to use this as a springboard to look at hospital care in the broadest sense (including transfers with medical home and accountable-care organizations). To start, SHM has convened a blue-ribbon group of hospital CMOs, CQOs, nursing executives, and other leaders in the hospital C-suite. Former SHM president Pat Cawley, MD, MBA, FHM, assistant professor and executive medical officer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, will chair this effort.

In these two initiatives, SHM and national hospital leaders are providing direction and innovation at two entry points—the C-suite and executive team—as well as on the front lines with the other healthcare professionals who care for our nation’s hospitalized patients.

More to Come

HM has had an interesting decade, growing to more than 30,000 hospitalists now practicing in 75% of our nation’s hospitals. We’ve taken on comanagement and are providing real success as change agents. But the decade to come will see the reinvention of our nation’s hospitals and distinct changes in workflow and responsibilities. We are moving from care based on the unit of the visit or the procedure to episodes of care. We are moving from a system that rewards just doing something to one that rewards doing the correct thing and doing it well. We are moving our hospitals from a swap meet where each physician has a booth and everyone supports those individual efforts to an institution with a culture that is patient-centered, based on quality measurement and performance, and provides care delivered by teams of health professionals working in concert.

This is a world that hospitalists can thrive in and, with your help and direction, SHM will provide the tools along the way. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

While most of the focus has been on D.C. and the trillions of dollars to be spent on healthcare reform, HM has grown substantially in the last decade without any significant payment reform or new regulation. This is all the more incredible because the rise of HM has involved two institutions not synonymous with accepting or adapting to change: physicians and hospitals.

In the coming years, hospitals face important challenges, including their fiscal survival, public trust, workforce shortages, difficulty deciding whether their physicians are partners or competitors, and figuring out what to do about all this patient safety and performance improvement hubbub.

Although 2010’s version of healthcare reform will be about increasing access (see “An Imperfect Solution,” January 2010, p. 44), there are still the seeds planted to address the next two pillars of reform: reducing cost and rewarding performance. Together, they create the value proposition in healthcare. All this will make the coming decade one in which the hospital as an institution will need to evolve and adapt if it is to survive.

What is Quality?

As we enter a transitional phase, in some ways, we aren’t even clear on just what quality healthcare is:

• Is quality defined as a payment issue? We see this in discussions of not paying for “never events” or denying payment for readmissions.
• Is quality about being more satisfied? This is found in emphasis on the surveys of patient and family satisfaction that drive hospital CEO compensation and bonuses, as well as in efforts to improve staff retention or in recognition by business, insurers, and government.
• Is quality just checking things off on a clipboard? We all see the endless list of quality measures and increasing documentation that providers have told their patients to stop smoking or get a flu shot, but is that really the quality we are seeking in healthcare?
• Is quality just avoiding embarrassment? Is the best driver of performance improvement outraged hospital trustees wielding printouts comparing hospitals?

We do know that in some ways, the discussion at most of our hospitals has shifted from “Is quality important?” to “How do we do it?” And in this discussion, HM and SHM have taken a leading role in the “solutions” to the problem. Our innovative programs help reduce unnecessary DVTs, improve glycemic control, and refine the discharge process (see Project BOOST) for better patient/family satisfaction, reduced ED visits, and reduced readmissions.

New Ways to Deliver Care

The hospital of the future—I’m talking 2020—will not be defined by bricks and walls. The hospital stay will not end with a patient in a wheelchair being helped into their car. We already know that most patients don’t leave the hospital cured, but are discharged when they are not sick enough to need to stay recumbent in the most expensive hotel in the city. Often these patients are in midcourse of an acute illness, frequently imposed on top of chronic dysfunctions.

While the patient as the true “medical home” for their health and illness have always borne the potholes of slipped handoffs and information transfer deficits, hospitalists now have a clear view of the precarious nature of post-discharge care. Bundling and payment reform, designed to reward coordination of care and the reduction of readmissions to the ED, might be a revenue-driven boost to our ill-designed healthcare system, but the hospital, with the help of their hospitalists, can take the lead in fixing these problems. And we don’t have to wait for payment reform.

The good news is we aren’t alone in our efforts to change the culture, even the mission, of our hospitals. In a time of healthcarewide workforce shortages, there are increasing demands for direct inpatient care, coupled with the added time needed to document current performance and train and implement needed improvements. The only way to meet all of the volume and performance demands is with process change. We need a different way to deliver care to hospitalized patients.

All-Star Teams

High-performing organizations are composed of high-performance teams and a set of operating principles that create a widespread culture of motivated individuals who are focused on metrics, are execution-driven, and are committed to continual improvement and rapid adaptation.

The characteristics of high-performance teams are that they:

• Self-correct and reallocate resources;
• Have clear roles and responsibilities;
• Have clear, valued, and shared visions;
• Have strong team leadership;
• Develop a strong sense of “collective” trust and confidence; and
• Manage and optimize performance outcomes.

SHM has taken the lead at a national level in helping to organize the Hospital Care Collaborative (HCC), which is made up of CEOs and leaders in nursing, pharmacy, case management, social workers, and respiratory therapy. The HCC has published a set of “Common Principles” (see “Common Principles for the Hospital Care Collaborative”) and is planning to develop practical strategies for building high-performance teams at our nation’s hospitals.

SHM recently received support from Ortho-McNeil and has created a partnership with the American Hospital Association, American Organization of Nurse Executives, and American College of Physician Executives to develop principles and strategies to implement high-performance teams and to use this as a springboard to look at hospital care in the broadest sense (including transfers with medical home and accountable-care organizations). To start, SHM has convened a blue-ribbon group of hospital CMOs, CQOs, nursing executives, and other leaders in the hospital C-suite. Former SHM president Pat Cawley, MD, MBA, FHM, assistant professor and executive medical officer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, will chair this effort.

In these two initiatives, SHM and national hospital leaders are providing direction and innovation at two entry points—the C-suite and executive team—as well as on the front lines with the other healthcare professionals who care for our nation’s hospitalized patients.

More to Come

HM has had an interesting decade, growing to more than 30,000 hospitalists now practicing in 75% of our nation’s hospitals. We’ve taken on comanagement and are providing real success as change agents. But the decade to come will see the reinvention of our nation’s hospitals and distinct changes in workflow and responsibilities. We are moving from care based on the unit of the visit or the procedure to episodes of care. We are moving from a system that rewards just doing something to one that rewards doing the correct thing and doing it well. We are moving our hospitals from a swap meet where each physician has a booth and everyone supports those individual efforts to an institution with a culture that is patient-centered, based on quality measurement and performance, and provides care delivered by teams of health professionals working in concert.

This is a world that hospitalists can thrive in and, with your help and direction, SHM will provide the tools along the way. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

There is no doubt we are getting healthcare reform, and in the end, Democrats will declare victory for the first meaningful progress since the 1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid were passed. Of course, in the interim, we have had legislation facilitating the development of HMOs under President Nixon and a senior pharmacy benefit under President George W. Bush, but many presidents have flailed at taking a crack at making major changes.

Republicans will declare victory, too, for stopping many bad ideas and trying to hold the line on costs. And everyone will complain about all the things that are not in the bill President Obama will sign this year.

And everyone will be right.

One Out of Three

To oversimplify things, all of the talk about healthcare reform has focused on three main areas:

• Increasing access for the uninsured and underinsured;
• Reigning in healthcare costs; and
• Designing a new system that rewards performance and safety.

At best, all we are getting is a down payment on access—and it will come with a substantial cost.

But what we are more likely beginning is an unraveling of business as usual and a reshuffling of the deck—and some key stakeholders won’t like the cards they will be dealt. The best way to think of what is happening in 2010 is that this is the first step toward having the healthcare system we will have in 2020.

Civic Obligation

It is a national embarrassment for the U.S. to be the only developed country that has not come up with a solution that offers most of its citizens access to healthcare. As a culture, we have decided that every child deserves a free education, that all families should have access to fire and police protection, and that we all should have access to due process and “an attorney who will be appointed to you if you cannot afford one.”

But right now in our country, about 47 million people live sicker and die quicker because of a healthcare system that doesn’t include them. A more sorry aspect is the “underinsured,” the constantly employed person with “good” insurance who is unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with cancer only to find out that their $1 million lifetime benefit runs out in year two or three. Those families face the tough choices between bankruptcy and foreclosure, or allowing Mom or Dad to give up another year or two or three of life. Is this the America we are living in?

Reform, Part I

To get this partial loaf of healthcare reform, Obama and Congressional leaders had to be creative. What has torpedoed previous efforts has been the vast power and reach of large, well-funded stakeholders who see any change as a threat and take a “what’s in it for me” approach. These industries have not been shy about using power and money to influence Congress and the White House, and even more insidiously have gone “direct” with advertisements and commentators who use “Harry and Louise” tactics to frighten an underinformed public about this complex process.

But this time, Obama promised the doctors, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, the device-makers, and just about anybody who would listen that “they” would not be hurt by these reforms. In fact, in the access discussion for many of these stakeholders, the initial result would be 47 million more customers paying for healthcare products and services. Is it any wonder that the price tag must go up, and by trillions of dollars?

It is the price of admission, at least to get the ball rolling. Now we all are in the box. With a price tag approaching $3 trillion a year, and an aging population and a taxpaying workforce shrinking relative to those they must support with entitlements (think Medicare and Social Security), the die is cast for “Healthcare Reform: The Sequel.”

Trust me—the next round of change will be more cataclysmic. In the aggregate, physicians will make less than the nearly $500 billion we make now. Sure, the primary-care physicians (PCPs) and lower-paid specialties might not be hit (and could even move up), but some physicians will see a marked change in their compensation.

Hospitals will need to adapt as well. They must become more efficient. We saw this in California, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, as capitation and managed care ratcheted down on the old “cost-plus” payment method and moved the industry to reward value and efficiency. Those who are efficient and effective will do very well. Those who have lived by just doing more and more without demonstrating their performance or achieving standards will suffer and be dissatisfied.

More Reforms Possible

The future of the insurance industry will be very different as well, maybe because of government’s more intrusive role (think Medicare for most people) or by evolving to a model like Germany’s, where 200 nonprofit insurance companies compete for business. We will demand that insurance companies return $0.95 on the dollar for patient care, not $0.75 or less, as is common practice today.

Device-makers and Big Pharma might start to see a glimpse into the future as comparative-effectiveness research looks at the value of new, expensive technology and advances in treatments. As medications become “included” in the standard benefits bundle, just like physician fees and hospitalizations, we will see a relentless push downward on pricing. Drugs will become just one more line item to be budgeted for, especially if MedPAC and Congress are involved. We will get what we can afford, not everything that is possible or available.

Because this is 21st-century America, under the cacophony of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow, the potential losers will be loud. They will trumpet any fact or pseudo-fact to alarm the populace. Phrases like “government takeover” and “you will lose the great healthcare you have,” and “death squads” and “illegal immigrants” and “back to 19th-century healthcare,” will bounce around the 24-hour news cycle. They will make real, positive change difficult.

But the beauty of what we are passing now, in 2010, is that the train is leaving the station. We are burning the boats. The healthcare system shakeup officially is under way. There is no turning back.

HM was not borne of a new law or mandate. We are an innovation of a system that must change and evolve. And while HM is not all it eventually will be, there are hints of what we can become. For a new healthcare system that offers greater access and is grounded in documented performance and efficiency, HM will be a solution for hospitals with hospitalist groups.

A lot of uncertainty remains out there, and the next decade promises to be even more turbulent, but hospitalists are as well positioned as any stakeholder in healthcare.

We are ready to be an active, contributing, and solution-oriented profession that will add value to our patients and our healthcare communities.

Stay tuned. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

There is no doubt we are getting healthcare reform, and in the end, Democrats will declare victory for the first meaningful progress since the 1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid were passed. Of course, in the interim, we have had legislation facilitating the development of HMOs under President Nixon and a senior pharmacy benefit under President George W. Bush, but many presidents have flailed at taking a crack at making major changes.

Republicans will declare victory, too, for stopping many bad ideas and trying to hold the line on costs. And everyone will complain about all the things that are not in the bill President Obama will sign this year.

And everyone will be right.

One Out of Three

To oversimplify things, all of the talk about healthcare reform has focused on three main areas:

• Increasing access for the uninsured and underinsured;
• Reigning in healthcare costs; and
• Designing a new system that rewards performance and safety.

At best, all we are getting is a down payment on access—and it will come with a substantial cost.

But what we are more likely beginning is an unraveling of business as usual and a reshuffling of the deck—and some key stakeholders won’t like the cards they will be dealt. The best way to think of what is happening in 2010 is that this is the first step toward having the healthcare system we will have in 2020.

Civic Obligation

It is a national embarrassment for the U.S. to be the only developed country that has not come up with a solution that offers most of its citizens access to healthcare. As a culture, we have decided that every child deserves a free education, that all families should have access to fire and police protection, and that we all should have access to due process and “an attorney who will be appointed to you if you cannot afford one.”

But right now in our country, about 47 million people live sicker and die quicker because of a healthcare system that doesn’t include them. A more sorry aspect is the “underinsured,” the constantly employed person with “good” insurance who is unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with cancer only to find out that their $1 million lifetime benefit runs out in year two or three. Those families face the tough choices between bankruptcy and foreclosure, or allowing Mom or Dad to give up another year or two or three of life. Is this the America we are living in?

Reform, Part I

To get this partial loaf of healthcare reform, Obama and Congressional leaders had to be creative. What has torpedoed previous efforts has been the vast power and reach of large, well-funded stakeholders who see any change as a threat and take a “what’s in it for me” approach. These industries have not been shy about using power and money to influence Congress and the White House, and even more insidiously have gone “direct” with advertisements and commentators who use “Harry and Louise” tactics to frighten an underinformed public about this complex process.

But this time, Obama promised the doctors, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, the device-makers, and just about anybody who would listen that “they” would not be hurt by these reforms. In fact, in the access discussion for many of these stakeholders, the initial result would be 47 million more customers paying for healthcare products and services. Is it any wonder that the price tag must go up, and by trillions of dollars?

It is the price of admission, at least to get the ball rolling. Now we all are in the box. With a price tag approaching $3 trillion a year, and an aging population and a taxpaying workforce shrinking relative to those they must support with entitlements (think Medicare and Social Security), the die is cast for “Healthcare Reform: The Sequel.”

Trust me—the next round of change will be more cataclysmic. In the aggregate, physicians will make less than the nearly $500 billion we make now. Sure, the primary-care physicians (PCPs) and lower-paid specialties might not be hit (and could even move up), but some physicians will see a marked change in their compensation.

Hospitals will need to adapt as well. They must become more efficient. We saw this in California, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, as capitation and managed care ratcheted down on the old “cost-plus” payment method and moved the industry to reward value and efficiency. Those who are efficient and effective will do very well. Those who have lived by just doing more and more without demonstrating their performance or achieving standards will suffer and be dissatisfied.

More Reforms Possible

The future of the insurance industry will be very different as well, maybe because of government’s more intrusive role (think Medicare for most people) or by evolving to a model like Germany’s, where 200 nonprofit insurance companies compete for business. We will demand that insurance companies return $0.95 on the dollar for patient care, not $0.75 or less, as is common practice today.

Device-makers and Big Pharma might start to see a glimpse into the future as comparative-effectiveness research looks at the value of new, expensive technology and advances in treatments. As medications become “included” in the standard benefits bundle, just like physician fees and hospitalizations, we will see a relentless push downward on pricing. Drugs will become just one more line item to be budgeted for, especially if MedPAC and Congress are involved. We will get what we can afford, not everything that is possible or available.

Because this is 21st-century America, under the cacophony of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow, the potential losers will be loud. They will trumpet any fact or pseudo-fact to alarm the populace. Phrases like “government takeover” and “you will lose the great healthcare you have,” and “death squads” and “illegal immigrants” and “back to 19th-century healthcare,” will bounce around the 24-hour news cycle. They will make real, positive change difficult.

But the beauty of what we are passing now, in 2010, is that the train is leaving the station. We are burning the boats. The healthcare system shakeup officially is under way. There is no turning back.

HM was not borne of a new law or mandate. We are an innovation of a system that must change and evolve. And while HM is not all it eventually will be, there are hints of what we can become. For a new healthcare system that offers greater access and is grounded in documented performance and efficiency, HM will be a solution for hospitals with hospitalist groups.

A lot of uncertainty remains out there, and the next decade promises to be even more turbulent, but hospitalists are as well positioned as any stakeholder in healthcare.

We are ready to be an active, contributing, and solution-oriented profession that will add value to our patients and our healthcare communities.

Stay tuned. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

There is no doubt we are getting healthcare reform, and in the end, Democrats will declare victory for the first meaningful progress since the 1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid were passed. Of course, in the interim, we have had legislation facilitating the development of HMOs under President Nixon and a senior pharmacy benefit under President George W. Bush, but many presidents have flailed at taking a crack at making major changes.

Republicans will declare victory, too, for stopping many bad ideas and trying to hold the line on costs. And everyone will complain about all the things that are not in the bill President Obama will sign this year.

And everyone will be right.

One Out of Three

To oversimplify things, all of the talk about healthcare reform has focused on three main areas:

• Increasing access for the uninsured and underinsured;
• Reigning in healthcare costs; and
• Designing a new system that rewards performance and safety.

At best, all we are getting is a down payment on access—and it will come with a substantial cost.

But what we are more likely beginning is an unraveling of business as usual and a reshuffling of the deck—and some key stakeholders won’t like the cards they will be dealt. The best way to think of what is happening in 2010 is that this is the first step toward having the healthcare system we will have in 2020.

Civic Obligation

It is a national embarrassment for the U.S. to be the only developed country that has not come up with a solution that offers most of its citizens access to healthcare. As a culture, we have decided that every child deserves a free education, that all families should have access to fire and police protection, and that we all should have access to due process and “an attorney who will be appointed to you if you cannot afford one.”

But right now in our country, about 47 million people live sicker and die quicker because of a healthcare system that doesn’t include them. A more sorry aspect is the “underinsured,” the constantly employed person with “good” insurance who is unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with cancer only to find out that their $1 million lifetime benefit runs out in year two or three. Those families face the tough choices between bankruptcy and foreclosure, or allowing Mom or Dad to give up another year or two or three of life. Is this the America we are living in?

Reform, Part I

To get this partial loaf of healthcare reform, Obama and Congressional leaders had to be creative. What has torpedoed previous efforts has been the vast power and reach of large, well-funded stakeholders who see any change as a threat and take a “what’s in it for me” approach. These industries have not been shy about using power and money to influence Congress and the White House, and even more insidiously have gone “direct” with advertisements and commentators who use “Harry and Louise” tactics to frighten an underinformed public about this complex process.

But this time, Obama promised the doctors, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, the device-makers, and just about anybody who would listen that “they” would not be hurt by these reforms. In fact, in the access discussion for many of these stakeholders, the initial result would be 47 million more customers paying for healthcare products and services. Is it any wonder that the price tag must go up, and by trillions of dollars?

It is the price of admission, at least to get the ball rolling. Now we all are in the box. With a price tag approaching $3 trillion a year, and an aging population and a taxpaying workforce shrinking relative to those they must support with entitlements (think Medicare and Social Security), the die is cast for “Healthcare Reform: The Sequel.”

Trust me—the next round of change will be more cataclysmic. In the aggregate, physicians will make less than the nearly $500 billion we make now. Sure, the primary-care physicians (PCPs) and lower-paid specialties might not be hit (and could even move up), but some physicians will see a marked change in their compensation.

Hospitals will need to adapt as well. They must become more efficient. We saw this in California, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, as capitation and managed care ratcheted down on the old “cost-plus” payment method and moved the industry to reward value and efficiency. Those who are efficient and effective will do very well. Those who have lived by just doing more and more without demonstrating their performance or achieving standards will suffer and be dissatisfied.

More Reforms Possible

The future of the insurance industry will be very different as well, maybe because of government’s more intrusive role (think Medicare for most people) or by evolving to a model like Germany’s, where 200 nonprofit insurance companies compete for business. We will demand that insurance companies return $0.95 on the dollar for patient care, not $0.75 or less, as is common practice today.

Device-makers and Big Pharma might start to see a glimpse into the future as comparative-effectiveness research looks at the value of new, expensive technology and advances in treatments. As medications become “included” in the standard benefits bundle, just like physician fees and hospitalizations, we will see a relentless push downward on pricing. Drugs will become just one more line item to be budgeted for, especially if MedPAC and Congress are involved. We will get what we can afford, not everything that is possible or available.

Because this is 21st-century America, under the cacophony of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow, the potential losers will be loud. They will trumpet any fact or pseudo-fact to alarm the populace. Phrases like “government takeover” and “you will lose the great healthcare you have,” and “death squads” and “illegal immigrants” and “back to 19th-century healthcare,” will bounce around the 24-hour news cycle. They will make real, positive change difficult.

But the beauty of what we are passing now, in 2010, is that the train is leaving the station. We are burning the boats. The healthcare system shakeup officially is under way. There is no turning back.

HM was not borne of a new law or mandate. We are an innovation of a system that must change and evolve. And while HM is not all it eventually will be, there are hints of what we can become. For a new healthcare system that offers greater access and is grounded in documented performance and efficiency, HM will be a solution for hospitals with hospitalist groups.

A lot of uncertainty remains out there, and the next decade promises to be even more turbulent, but hospitalists are as well positioned as any stakeholder in healthcare.

We are ready to be an active, contributing, and solution-oriented profession that will add value to our patients and our healthcare communities.

Stay tuned. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

When HM was just a twinkle in Bob Wachter’s eye somewhere around 1998, the nascent board of the National Association of Inpatient Physicians (later to become SHM’s board of directors) tried to look forward to the scope and breadth of this new specialty they were hoping to help shape. With just 300 or so hospitalists in the country at that time, it is not surprising that the original board’s vision was that someday hospitalists might replace the inpatient work being done by 30% to 40% of internists and family practitioners. Now, a little more than a decade later, HM has a vista that in some ways can’t be contained inside a hospital’s four walls.

Today, with more than 30,000 hospitalists actively seeing patients in most U.S. hospitals, there has been a reinvention of primary care, with many of the inpatient duties now assumed by hospitalists. Although direct patient care likely will remain the primary role for hospitalists in the foreseeable future, it is not the whole story.

More and more, hospitalists have a leading role in improving the function of the hospital as a cohesive force in the healthcare community. Hospitalists are active in performance-improvement strategies, both in the implementation as well as the measurement and reporting of outcomes. Hospitalists are expected by other hospital health professionals to actively participate in the team approach to healthcare. As hospitals work to reinvent themselves to meet the challenges of the 21st century, whether driven by The Joint Commission, insurers, the business community, or government, the C-suite sees “their” hospitalists as part of the calculus for change.

And as surgical care and subspecialty care evolves, hospitalists are key partners. The fastest-growing aspect of HM today is the growth in the individual hospitalist’s role as the comanager of the surgical or specialty patient. This is much more than a consult. Comanagement involves a division of labor and accountability in which surgeons do what they do best and engage their partner hospitalists to prevent VTE, provide coverage to control perisurgical complications, and share the flow of information to the patients and their families.

So in some sense, the hospitalist provides the multiuse toolbox for all things “hospital,” sort of the Swiss Army knife of healthcare:

• Direct patient care;
• Systems fixer;
• Quality and safety officer;
• Teammate and team leader; and
• Partner to the surgeon and the cardiologist.

It’s quite a lot of value and versatility all wrapped up in one package.

But wait: That is just today. There is more out there on the horizon. (That, by the way, is hospitalist-speak for “some of this is already happening in real time; it’s just not being done by everyone.”)

HM: The Problem-Solver

Hospitalists are being engaged at the ebb and flow of healthcare. Most of us know that even when we do the A-1 job in the hospital that the voltage drops when patients are flung into the white space of the discharge process. Hospitalists know that a patient’s hospitalization doesn’t end at the hospital’s threshold. In many cases, the patient is not cured or returned to full function, but more often than not, the patient is just no longer sick enough to warrant the expense and the intensity of hospitalization.

SHM and our hospitalist leaders have been tackling the discharge process with our Project BOOST (Better Outcomes for Older Adults through Safe Transitions), with funding coming from the Hartford Foundation. Our goals are to give hospitalist-led teams of health professionals the tools and training to reduce unnecessary readmissions and ED visits, and to improve the satisfaction and confidence of our patients and their families. Not an easy task and not one that is over and done, but SHM and our hospitalists have a plan and a path to success.

But wait: There is more.

The patient flow within most hospitals is anything but smooth, error-free, or efficient. The issues develop as the patient travels from the ED to the ICU and out to the floor. The problems arise when multiple physicians manage a patient. There are potential cracks in the system (e.g., shift changes from nurse to nurse, or pharmacist to pharmacist). And, of course, the hospitalist-to-hospitalist handoff still could use some work.

But HM isn’t waiting for someone else to fix this problem. SHM is actively talking to funders about applying some lessons we have learned in our BOOST pilot sites and other performance-improvement efforts. We are beginning to provide the framework to ensure our patients a safe and error-free hospital stay.

It might seem like quite a leap for a specialty that was started to replace direct patient care for a small segment of primary-care physicians. But now, there may be even more for hospitalists to tackle. As policymakers talk of redefining accountabilities, it appears that hospitals will be held financially—and possibly even legally—responsible for patients’ outcomes, not just while they are an inpatient, but for 30 days or more after discharge, too. Tackling this would be daunting if every hospital were surrounded by an entire neighborhood of medical homes, but, of course, that is very much not the case today.

So when the hospital is charged with making sure that their recently discharged patients take the entire course of their prescribed treatment, get the follow-up testing at the right time, follow up on any abnormal results that came up during and after hospitalization, and basically do all the sub-acute care that patients should and often don’t receive, who do you think they will look to?

That’s right: Say hello to the “sub-acutist,” the next member of the hospitalist family tree, which already has nocturnists and SNFists. Most HM groups are busy enough just seeing their inpatients and making the hospital safer, improving quality, and co-managing the surgical and specialty patients. Now it looks as if hospitalist groups will be the fallback to see a patient for the first two or three post-discharge visits, especially when the hospital needs to be accountable for patient outcomes after a patient leaves the hospital. This is definitely not a jump into outpatient medicine, but more of an attempt to “complete” the hospitalization in a new world in which the expectation of the patient and the payor is that the acute illness doesn’t end at the hospital door.

Those of us who think strategically need to analyze what these varied roles for hospitalists mean for the selection of the right people to enter HM, and what education and support the next wave of hospitalists will need to be successful and deliver on the promises being made to our healthcare communities.

SHM and numerous hospitalist companies and organizations are on the leading edge, thinking through these possibilities, and building HM for the future—which, by the way, already is here.

They used to say in a commercial, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Well, tomorrow’s HM is looking very much like not your older brother’s HM. Love the change; live the change. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

When HM was just a twinkle in Bob Wachter’s eye somewhere around 1998, the nascent board of the National Association of Inpatient Physicians (later to become SHM’s board of directors) tried to look forward to the scope and breadth of this new specialty they were hoping to help shape. With just 300 or so hospitalists in the country at that time, it is not surprising that the original board’s vision was that someday hospitalists might replace the inpatient work being done by 30% to 40% of internists and family practitioners. Now, a little more than a decade later, HM has a vista that in some ways can’t be contained inside a hospital’s four walls.

Today, with more than 30,000 hospitalists actively seeing patients in most U.S. hospitals, there has been a reinvention of primary care, with many of the inpatient duties now assumed by hospitalists. Although direct patient care likely will remain the primary role for hospitalists in the foreseeable future, it is not the whole story.

More and more, hospitalists have a leading role in improving the function of the hospital as a cohesive force in the healthcare community. Hospitalists are active in performance-improvement strategies, both in the implementation as well as the measurement and reporting of outcomes. Hospitalists are expected by other hospital health professionals to actively participate in the team approach to healthcare. As hospitals work to reinvent themselves to meet the challenges of the 21st century, whether driven by The Joint Commission, insurers, the business community, or government, the C-suite sees “their” hospitalists as part of the calculus for change.

And as surgical care and subspecialty care evolves, hospitalists are key partners. The fastest-growing aspect of HM today is the growth in the individual hospitalist’s role as the comanager of the surgical or specialty patient. This is much more than a consult. Comanagement involves a division of labor and accountability in which surgeons do what they do best and engage their partner hospitalists to prevent VTE, provide coverage to control perisurgical complications, and share the flow of information to the patients and their families.

So in some sense, the hospitalist provides the multiuse toolbox for all things “hospital,” sort of the Swiss Army knife of healthcare:

• Direct patient care;
• Systems fixer;
• Quality and safety officer;
• Teammate and team leader; and
• Partner to the surgeon and the cardiologist.

It’s quite a lot of value and versatility all wrapped up in one package.

But wait: That is just today. There is more out there on the horizon. (That, by the way, is hospitalist-speak for “some of this is already happening in real time; it’s just not being done by everyone.”)

HM: The Problem-Solver

Hospitalists are being engaged at the ebb and flow of healthcare. Most of us know that even when we do the A-1 job in the hospital that the voltage drops when patients are flung into the white space of the discharge process. Hospitalists know that a patient’s hospitalization doesn’t end at the hospital’s threshold. In many cases, the patient is not cured or returned to full function, but more often than not, the patient is just no longer sick enough to warrant the expense and the intensity of hospitalization.

SHM and our hospitalist leaders have been tackling the discharge process with our Project BOOST (Better Outcomes for Older Adults through Safe Transitions), with funding coming from the Hartford Foundation. Our goals are to give hospitalist-led teams of health professionals the tools and training to reduce unnecessary readmissions and ED visits, and to improve the satisfaction and confidence of our patients and their families. Not an easy task and not one that is over and done, but SHM and our hospitalists have a plan and a path to success.

But wait: There is more.

The patient flow within most hospitals is anything but smooth, error-free, or efficient. The issues develop as the patient travels from the ED to the ICU and out to the floor. The problems arise when multiple physicians manage a patient. There are potential cracks in the system (e.g., shift changes from nurse to nurse, or pharmacist to pharmacist). And, of course, the hospitalist-to-hospitalist handoff still could use some work.

But HM isn’t waiting for someone else to fix this problem. SHM is actively talking to funders about applying some lessons we have learned in our BOOST pilot sites and other performance-improvement efforts. We are beginning to provide the framework to ensure our patients a safe and error-free hospital stay.

It might seem like quite a leap for a specialty that was started to replace direct patient care for a small segment of primary-care physicians. But now, there may be even more for hospitalists to tackle. As policymakers talk of redefining accountabilities, it appears that hospitals will be held financially—and possibly even legally—responsible for patients’ outcomes, not just while they are an inpatient, but for 30 days or more after discharge, too. Tackling this would be daunting if every hospital were surrounded by an entire neighborhood of medical homes, but, of course, that is very much not the case today.

So when the hospital is charged with making sure that their recently discharged patients take the entire course of their prescribed treatment, get the follow-up testing at the right time, follow up on any abnormal results that came up during and after hospitalization, and basically do all the sub-acute care that patients should and often don’t receive, who do you think they will look to?

That’s right: Say hello to the “sub-acutist,” the next member of the hospitalist family tree, which already has nocturnists and SNFists. Most HM groups are busy enough just seeing their inpatients and making the hospital safer, improving quality, and co-managing the surgical and specialty patients. Now it looks as if hospitalist groups will be the fallback to see a patient for the first two or three post-discharge visits, especially when the hospital needs to be accountable for patient outcomes after a patient leaves the hospital. This is definitely not a jump into outpatient medicine, but more of an attempt to “complete” the hospitalization in a new world in which the expectation of the patient and the payor is that the acute illness doesn’t end at the hospital door.

Those of us who think strategically need to analyze what these varied roles for hospitalists mean for the selection of the right people to enter HM, and what education and support the next wave of hospitalists will need to be successful and deliver on the promises being made to our healthcare communities.

SHM and numerous hospitalist companies and organizations are on the leading edge, thinking through these possibilities, and building HM for the future—which, by the way, already is here.

They used to say in a commercial, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Well, tomorrow’s HM is looking very much like not your older brother’s HM. Love the change; live the change. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

When HM was just a twinkle in Bob Wachter’s eye somewhere around 1998, the nascent board of the National Association of Inpatient Physicians (later to become SHM’s board of directors) tried to look forward to the scope and breadth of this new specialty they were hoping to help shape. With just 300 or so hospitalists in the country at that time, it is not surprising that the original board’s vision was that someday hospitalists might replace the inpatient work being done by 30% to 40% of internists and family practitioners. Now, a little more than a decade later, HM has a vista that in some ways can’t be contained inside a hospital’s four walls.

Today, with more than 30,000 hospitalists actively seeing patients in most U.S. hospitals, there has been a reinvention of primary care, with many of the inpatient duties now assumed by hospitalists. Although direct patient care likely will remain the primary role for hospitalists in the foreseeable future, it is not the whole story.

More and more, hospitalists have a leading role in improving the function of the hospital as a cohesive force in the healthcare community. Hospitalists are active in performance-improvement strategies, both in the implementation as well as the measurement and reporting of outcomes. Hospitalists are expected by other hospital health professionals to actively participate in the team approach to healthcare. As hospitals work to reinvent themselves to meet the challenges of the 21st century, whether driven by The Joint Commission, insurers, the business community, or government, the C-suite sees “their” hospitalists as part of the calculus for change.

And as surgical care and subspecialty care evolves, hospitalists are key partners. The fastest-growing aspect of HM today is the growth in the individual hospitalist’s role as the comanager of the surgical or specialty patient. This is much more than a consult. Comanagement involves a division of labor and accountability in which surgeons do what they do best and engage their partner hospitalists to prevent VTE, provide coverage to control perisurgical complications, and share the flow of information to the patients and their families.

So in some sense, the hospitalist provides the multiuse toolbox for all things “hospital,” sort of the Swiss Army knife of healthcare:

• Direct patient care;
• Systems fixer;
• Quality and safety officer;
• Teammate and team leader; and
• Partner to the surgeon and the cardiologist.

It’s quite a lot of value and versatility all wrapped up in one package.

But wait: That is just today. There is more out there on the horizon. (That, by the way, is hospitalist-speak for “some of this is already happening in real time; it’s just not being done by everyone.”)

HM: The Problem-Solver

Hospitalists are being engaged at the ebb and flow of healthcare. Most of us know that even when we do the A-1 job in the hospital that the voltage drops when patients are flung into the white space of the discharge process. Hospitalists know that a patient’s hospitalization doesn’t end at the hospital’s threshold. In many cases, the patient is not cured or returned to full function, but more often than not, the patient is just no longer sick enough to warrant the expense and the intensity of hospitalization.

SHM and our hospitalist leaders have been tackling the discharge process with our Project BOOST (Better Outcomes for Older Adults through Safe Transitions), with funding coming from the Hartford Foundation. Our goals are to give hospitalist-led teams of health professionals the tools and training to reduce unnecessary readmissions and ED visits, and to improve the satisfaction and confidence of our patients and their families. Not an easy task and not one that is over and done, but SHM and our hospitalists have a plan and a path to success.

But wait: There is more.

The patient flow within most hospitals is anything but smooth, error-free, or efficient. The issues develop as the patient travels from the ED to the ICU and out to the floor. The problems arise when multiple physicians manage a patient. There are potential cracks in the system (e.g., shift changes from nurse to nurse, or pharmacist to pharmacist). And, of course, the hospitalist-to-hospitalist handoff still could use some work.

But HM isn’t waiting for someone else to fix this problem. SHM is actively talking to funders about applying some lessons we have learned in our BOOST pilot sites and other performance-improvement efforts. We are beginning to provide the framework to ensure our patients a safe and error-free hospital stay.

It might seem like quite a leap for a specialty that was started to replace direct patient care for a small segment of primary-care physicians. But now, there may be even more for hospitalists to tackle. As policymakers talk of redefining accountabilities, it appears that hospitals will be held financially—and possibly even legally—responsible for patients’ outcomes, not just while they are an inpatient, but for 30 days or more after discharge, too. Tackling this would be daunting if every hospital were surrounded by an entire neighborhood of medical homes, but, of course, that is very much not the case today.

So when the hospital is charged with making sure that their recently discharged patients take the entire course of their prescribed treatment, get the follow-up testing at the right time, follow up on any abnormal results that came up during and after hospitalization, and basically do all the sub-acute care that patients should and often don’t receive, who do you think they will look to?

That’s right: Say hello to the “sub-acutist,” the next member of the hospitalist family tree, which already has nocturnists and SNFists. Most HM groups are busy enough just seeing their inpatients and making the hospital safer, improving quality, and co-managing the surgical and specialty patients. Now it looks as if hospitalist groups will be the fallback to see a patient for the first two or three post-discharge visits, especially when the hospital needs to be accountable for patient outcomes after a patient leaves the hospital. This is definitely not a jump into outpatient medicine, but more of an attempt to “complete” the hospitalization in a new world in which the expectation of the patient and the payor is that the acute illness doesn’t end at the hospital door.

Those of us who think strategically need to analyze what these varied roles for hospitalists mean for the selection of the right people to enter HM, and what education and support the next wave of hospitalists will need to be successful and deliver on the promises being made to our healthcare communities.

SHM and numerous hospitalist companies and organizations are on the leading edge, thinking through these possibilities, and building HM for the future—which, by the way, already is here.

They used to say in a commercial, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Well, tomorrow’s HM is looking very much like not your older brother’s HM. Love the change; live the change. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

Idon’t know about you, but sometimes I feel as if we are living in an era of information overload when it comes to all of the ideas that are spilling out of Washington and elsewhere under the sobriquet of “healthcare reform.” I thought we should take a few minutes and try to bring all these proposals into focus.

There is an ideal, almost a nirvana, that is being sought. This would include access with a very big “A” to include most, if not all, Americans, and would recognize key differences in patients (comorbidities), and would incentivize value (e.g., quality and cost), and promote evidence-based medicine (EBM) instead of the usual and customary.

That is a far cry from the system that we currently function in. The reality of today is much simpler, at least for the payment part of the system. A hospital or a doctor does something specific, such as a procedure or a visit, and whoever provides the care submits the bill. It is finite and usually involves a small group of individuals or facilities. Because it is simple and to the point, it allows small hospitals and the generally fragmented physician practices to be in the game.

Unfortunately, this system of payment and reward has not led us to the outcomes or performance that our country’s leaders or businesses, and more and more our patients, think we should be getting for our $2.2 trillion. Part of this is due to the fragmentation and variability in how healthcare currently is delivered. More unfortunate is the reality of the disconnect between patients and providers, and the complexity of care. In most healthcare communities, patients can wander through the course of their care to many providers and facilities, most of which have no common information system or business relationship.

One solution that is being considered in Washington is bundling. When policy wonks talk about bundling of payment for an episode of care, they are envisioning a world in which whoever is paying for care (Medicare, insurers, etc.) can pay one fee that would encompass the care provided by all providers, all facilities, and over a broad timeframe (e.g., hospitalization, then 30 days post-discharge). That might work for Mayo in southern Minnesota, Geisinger in northeast Pennsylvania, or Kaiser in Northern California, but just how would it work in the vast majority of places in the U.S.?

If a patient’s care involves two or three separate facilities or a number of providers in the hospital, and it spans as many as 30 days after discharge, how would you assign responsibility for flaws in the patient’s care or the need for additional services? And where is the patient responsibility in all of this?

Knowing all of this, is Congress really ready to write new regulations and pivot 180 degrees on the current system? Glenn Steele, CEO of Geisinger Health System and a recognized leader in a forward-thinking organization, has said, “We probably ought to have a system where we can be innovative, rather than just a new set of rules.”

Baby Steps

In some ways, healthcare reform already is moving forward. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has enacted “never events” in an attempt to improve performance by withholding payment for incidents Medicare thinks just shouldn’t happen (e.g., wrong-side surgery, some hospital-acquired infections).

In addition, 14 communities are ready to perform three-year “comparative effectiveness” trials to attempt to coordinate care among disparate sectors of the healthcare continuum. The research model is looking for ways to deliver optimum care in less-organized sectors of healthcare.

In January, CMS announced site selections for the Acute Care Episode (ACE) demonstration project. ACE is a new, hospital-based demonstration that will test the use of a bundled payment for both hospital and physician services for a select set of inpatient episodes of care. The goal is to improve the quality of care delivered through Medicare fee-for-service. Baptist Health System in San Antonio; Oklahoma Heart Hospital LLC in Oklahoma City; Exempla Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver; Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla.; and Lovelace Health System in Albuquerque, N.M., will participate in the demonstration.

But even when we are just at the beginning of field-testing ideas to improve the delivery of care, all signs point to a major healthcare reform bill coming out of Congress this year. How can they know what will work when the demonstration projects are just starting? How can they anticipate the unintended consequences of wholesale reform? Well, that’s just what Congress can—and does—do. We will all be left to figure out the details on the fly.

The temperature seems to be getting turned up a notch with every healthcare blog and Web posting. When the public and legislators read what Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, wrote in The New Yorker and then it is quoted by the president, suddenly it seems that everyone knows that care is much more expensive in McAllen, Texas, than in nearby El Paso, albeit with worse outcomes. The solution is almost anything that purports to reduce unnecessary variability and ties payment to performance.

Prospective vs. Retrospective Payment

To allow yourself to have a broad context of payment reform, think of “prospective” and “retrospective” payment as two options for a new payment paradigm. Don’t roll your eyes; this stuff is material to how we earn our living.

A prospective system might drastically alter what we have now, by throwing out fee-for-service and no longer paying by the unit of the visit or the procedure, and instead using a global fee (e.g., bundling) that is geared more toward efficiency and effectiveness (i.e., use of resources and better outcomes).

On the other hand, a retrospective system might continue to pay a modified fee-for-service fee (i.e., lower than current reimbursement) with a “significant” bonus for performance (e.g., lower readmission rate, fewer visits to the ED) and improved measureable quality. Of course, this can be “new money” for quality or part of a holdback after upfront fees have been lowered.

In any event, we are probably entering an era in which hospitals and physicians will need to think of themselves as part of a “supply chain” and not just think “I did my job, so pay me.” And during this whole reshuffling of the healthcare deck, there might be calls to remove some of the inequities that have been cobbled onto the Medicare and insurance systems. For example, currently there are significant geographic disparities in Medicare reimbursement (e.g., surgery in Mississippi often is reimbursed at 50% of the same procedure in New York City or Los Angeles). And there are significant payment disparities between medical and surgical specialties and primary-care providers that the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) system has certainly not corrected.

Integration Hurdles

The small percentage of hospitals, physicians, and patients who currently are in an integrated system probably will have a smoother ride into healthcare’s new future. It is easier for Kaiser or Geisinger or HealthPartners in Minnesota to take on all of the business challenges and risks of accountability for performance and rewards for efficiency. But what about most of the rest of us?

Well, it looks as if we will need to be linked together by contracts and business relationships, by information transfer and management, and we will need strong, forward-thinking, innovative leadership. And we’ll need some trust in each other and our institutions going forward. Equally important, our patients will need to step up and into this new world. If providers and facilities are required to perform better, then patients have to stay in their contracted systems. To have accountability, patients must participate actively.

Some of you might be old enough to remember the last time integration of physicians and hospitals was all the rage. In the 1990s, the driving force was to achieve “economies of scale” and to meet the challenges of managed care with an integrated entity. Most of these attempts were expensive failures.

In 2010, the drive to integration might be the radical reworking of a payment system that is based on a global fee, a system that produces the highest quality at the lowest cost.

One caveat is that significant integration might not be possible. Do hospitals have the expertise and capacity to employ physicians to efficiently deliver care? In this recession, is the capital available to purchase and implement the information systems crucial to integrated care?

Prepared for Change

I profess to have no expertise as a prognosticator, but I do expect some significant changes to come out of Washington in 2009. The common wisdom is that we are currently spending enough in the aggregate to provide all Americans with access to healthcare, and to get better performance and less variability. That seems to mean shaping a new system.

SHM supports changes in payment methodologies that improve the quality and value of healthcare services, align incentives, and promote better clinical outcomes. We believe that healthcare pricing and quality should be transparent to patients and purchasers. We have supported the PQRI, hospital value-based purchasing, and loosening of restrictions on gainsharing between facilities and providers.

Hospitalists are positioned well. We practice in groups and often are aligned with many others in our medical staffs, and with our hospitals’ roles in our communities. We already are thinking about the value equation and trying to balance resources and performance. We are young, adaptable, and less entrenched. And we are new and have less to lose.

I am confident we can be helpful in shaping the future and can thrive in most any new environment. But hold on tight: The future is getting here way ahead of schedule. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

Idon’t know about you, but sometimes I feel as if we are living in an era of information overload when it comes to all of the ideas that are spilling out of Washington and elsewhere under the sobriquet of “healthcare reform.” I thought we should take a few minutes and try to bring all these proposals into focus.

There is an ideal, almost a nirvana, that is being sought. This would include access with a very big “A” to include most, if not all, Americans, and would recognize key differences in patients (comorbidities), and would incentivize value (e.g., quality and cost), and promote evidence-based medicine (EBM) instead of the usual and customary.

That is a far cry from the system that we currently function in. The reality of today is much simpler, at least for the payment part of the system. A hospital or a doctor does something specific, such as a procedure or a visit, and whoever provides the care submits the bill. It is finite and usually involves a small group of individuals or facilities. Because it is simple and to the point, it allows small hospitals and the generally fragmented physician practices to be in the game.

Unfortunately, this system of payment and reward has not led us to the outcomes or performance that our country’s leaders or businesses, and more and more our patients, think we should be getting for our $2.2 trillion. Part of this is due to the fragmentation and variability in how healthcare currently is delivered. More unfortunate is the reality of the disconnect between patients and providers, and the complexity of care. In most healthcare communities, patients can wander through the course of their care to many providers and facilities, most of which have no common information system or business relationship.

One solution that is being considered in Washington is bundling. When policy wonks talk about bundling of payment for an episode of care, they are envisioning a world in which whoever is paying for care (Medicare, insurers, etc.) can pay one fee that would encompass the care provided by all providers, all facilities, and over a broad timeframe (e.g., hospitalization, then 30 days post-discharge). That might work for Mayo in southern Minnesota, Geisinger in northeast Pennsylvania, or Kaiser in Northern California, but just how would it work in the vast majority of places in the U.S.?

If a patient’s care involves two or three separate facilities or a number of providers in the hospital, and it spans as many as 30 days after discharge, how would you assign responsibility for flaws in the patient’s care or the need for additional services? And where is the patient responsibility in all of this?

Knowing all of this, is Congress really ready to write new regulations and pivot 180 degrees on the current system? Glenn Steele, CEO of Geisinger Health System and a recognized leader in a forward-thinking organization, has said, “We probably ought to have a system where we can be innovative, rather than just a new set of rules.”

Baby Steps

In some ways, healthcare reform already is moving forward. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has enacted “never events” in an attempt to improve performance by withholding payment for incidents Medicare thinks just shouldn’t happen (e.g., wrong-side surgery, some hospital-acquired infections).

In addition, 14 communities are ready to perform three-year “comparative effectiveness” trials to attempt to coordinate care among disparate sectors of the healthcare continuum. The research model is looking for ways to deliver optimum care in less-organized sectors of healthcare.

In January, CMS announced site selections for the Acute Care Episode (ACE) demonstration project. ACE is a new, hospital-based demonstration that will test the use of a bundled payment for both hospital and physician services for a select set of inpatient episodes of care. The goal is to improve the quality of care delivered through Medicare fee-for-service. Baptist Health System in San Antonio; Oklahoma Heart Hospital LLC in Oklahoma City; Exempla Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver; Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla.; and Lovelace Health System in Albuquerque, N.M., will participate in the demonstration.

But even when we are just at the beginning of field-testing ideas to improve the delivery of care, all signs point to a major healthcare reform bill coming out of Congress this year. How can they know what will work when the demonstration projects are just starting? How can they anticipate the unintended consequences of wholesale reform? Well, that’s just what Congress can—and does—do. We will all be left to figure out the details on the fly.

The temperature seems to be getting turned up a notch with every healthcare blog and Web posting. When the public and legislators read what Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, wrote in The New Yorker and then it is quoted by the president, suddenly it seems that everyone knows that care is much more expensive in McAllen, Texas, than in nearby El Paso, albeit with worse outcomes. The solution is almost anything that purports to reduce unnecessary variability and ties payment to performance.

Prospective vs. Retrospective Payment

To allow yourself to have a broad context of payment reform, think of “prospective” and “retrospective” payment as two options for a new payment paradigm. Don’t roll your eyes; this stuff is material to how we earn our living.

A prospective system might drastically alter what we have now, by throwing out fee-for-service and no longer paying by the unit of the visit or the procedure, and instead using a global fee (e.g., bundling) that is geared more toward efficiency and effectiveness (i.e., use of resources and better outcomes).

On the other hand, a retrospective system might continue to pay a modified fee-for-service fee (i.e., lower than current reimbursement) with a “significant” bonus for performance (e.g., lower readmission rate, fewer visits to the ED) and improved measureable quality. Of course, this can be “new money” for quality or part of a holdback after upfront fees have been lowered.

In any event, we are probably entering an era in which hospitals and physicians will need to think of themselves as part of a “supply chain” and not just think “I did my job, so pay me.” And during this whole reshuffling of the healthcare deck, there might be calls to remove some of the inequities that have been cobbled onto the Medicare and insurance systems. For example, currently there are significant geographic disparities in Medicare reimbursement (e.g., surgery in Mississippi often is reimbursed at 50% of the same procedure in New York City or Los Angeles). And there are significant payment disparities between medical and surgical specialties and primary-care providers that the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) system has certainly not corrected.

Integration Hurdles

The small percentage of hospitals, physicians, and patients who currently are in an integrated system probably will have a smoother ride into healthcare’s new future. It is easier for Kaiser or Geisinger or HealthPartners in Minnesota to take on all of the business challenges and risks of accountability for performance and rewards for efficiency. But what about most of the rest of us?

Well, it looks as if we will need to be linked together by contracts and business relationships, by information transfer and management, and we will need strong, forward-thinking, innovative leadership. And we’ll need some trust in each other and our institutions going forward. Equally important, our patients will need to step up and into this new world. If providers and facilities are required to perform better, then patients have to stay in their contracted systems. To have accountability, patients must participate actively.

Some of you might be old enough to remember the last time integration of physicians and hospitals was all the rage. In the 1990s, the driving force was to achieve “economies of scale” and to meet the challenges of managed care with an integrated entity. Most of these attempts were expensive failures.

In 2010, the drive to integration might be the radical reworking of a payment system that is based on a global fee, a system that produces the highest quality at the lowest cost.

One caveat is that significant integration might not be possible. Do hospitals have the expertise and capacity to employ physicians to efficiently deliver care? In this recession, is the capital available to purchase and implement the information systems crucial to integrated care?

Prepared for Change

I profess to have no expertise as a prognosticator, but I do expect some significant changes to come out of Washington in 2009. The common wisdom is that we are currently spending enough in the aggregate to provide all Americans with access to healthcare, and to get better performance and less variability. That seems to mean shaping a new system.

SHM supports changes in payment methodologies that improve the quality and value of healthcare services, align incentives, and promote better clinical outcomes. We believe that healthcare pricing and quality should be transparent to patients and purchasers. We have supported the PQRI, hospital value-based purchasing, and loosening of restrictions on gainsharing between facilities and providers.

Hospitalists are positioned well. We practice in groups and often are aligned with many others in our medical staffs, and with our hospitals’ roles in our communities. We already are thinking about the value equation and trying to balance resources and performance. We are young, adaptable, and less entrenched. And we are new and have less to lose.

I am confident we can be helpful in shaping the future and can thrive in most any new environment. But hold on tight: The future is getting here way ahead of schedule. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

Idon’t know about you, but sometimes I feel as if we are living in an era of information overload when it comes to all of the ideas that are spilling out of Washington and elsewhere under the sobriquet of “healthcare reform.” I thought we should take a few minutes and try to bring all these proposals into focus.

There is an ideal, almost a nirvana, that is being sought. This would include access with a very big “A” to include most, if not all, Americans, and would recognize key differences in patients (comorbidities), and would incentivize value (e.g., quality and cost), and promote evidence-based medicine (EBM) instead of the usual and customary.

That is a far cry from the system that we currently function in. The reality of today is much simpler, at least for the payment part of the system. A hospital or a doctor does something specific, such as a procedure or a visit, and whoever provides the care submits the bill. It is finite and usually involves a small group of individuals or facilities. Because it is simple and to the point, it allows small hospitals and the generally fragmented physician practices to be in the game.

Unfortunately, this system of payment and reward has not led us to the outcomes or performance that our country’s leaders or businesses, and more and more our patients, think we should be getting for our $2.2 trillion. Part of this is due to the fragmentation and variability in how healthcare currently is delivered. More unfortunate is the reality of the disconnect between patients and providers, and the complexity of care. In most healthcare communities, patients can wander through the course of their care to many providers and facilities, most of which have no common information system or business relationship.

One solution that is being considered in Washington is bundling. When policy wonks talk about bundling of payment for an episode of care, they are envisioning a world in which whoever is paying for care (Medicare, insurers, etc.) can pay one fee that would encompass the care provided by all providers, all facilities, and over a broad timeframe (e.g., hospitalization, then 30 days post-discharge). That might work for Mayo in southern Minnesota, Geisinger in northeast Pennsylvania, or Kaiser in Northern California, but just how would it work in the vast majority of places in the U.S.?

If a patient’s care involves two or three separate facilities or a number of providers in the hospital, and it spans as many as 30 days after discharge, how would you assign responsibility for flaws in the patient’s care or the need for additional services? And where is the patient responsibility in all of this?

Knowing all of this, is Congress really ready to write new regulations and pivot 180 degrees on the current system? Glenn Steele, CEO of Geisinger Health System and a recognized leader in a forward-thinking organization, has said, “We probably ought to have a system where we can be innovative, rather than just a new set of rules.”

Baby Steps

In some ways, healthcare reform already is moving forward. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has enacted “never events” in an attempt to improve performance by withholding payment for incidents Medicare thinks just shouldn’t happen (e.g., wrong-side surgery, some hospital-acquired infections).

In addition, 14 communities are ready to perform three-year “comparative effectiveness” trials to attempt to coordinate care among disparate sectors of the healthcare continuum. The research model is looking for ways to deliver optimum care in less-organized sectors of healthcare.

In January, CMS announced site selections for the Acute Care Episode (ACE) demonstration project. ACE is a new, hospital-based demonstration that will test the use of a bundled payment for both hospital and physician services for a select set of inpatient episodes of care. The goal is to improve the quality of care delivered through Medicare fee-for-service. Baptist Health System in San Antonio; Oklahoma Heart Hospital LLC in Oklahoma City; Exempla Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver; Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla.; and Lovelace Health System in Albuquerque, N.M., will participate in the demonstration.

But even when we are just at the beginning of field-testing ideas to improve the delivery of care, all signs point to a major healthcare reform bill coming out of Congress this year. How can they know what will work when the demonstration projects are just starting? How can they anticipate the unintended consequences of wholesale reform? Well, that’s just what Congress can—and does—do. We will all be left to figure out the details on the fly.

The temperature seems to be getting turned up a notch with every healthcare blog and Web posting. When the public and legislators read what Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, wrote in The New Yorker and then it is quoted by the president, suddenly it seems that everyone knows that care is much more expensive in McAllen, Texas, than in nearby El Paso, albeit with worse outcomes. The solution is almost anything that purports to reduce unnecessary variability and ties payment to performance.

Prospective vs. Retrospective Payment

To allow yourself to have a broad context of payment reform, think of “prospective” and “retrospective” payment as two options for a new payment paradigm. Don’t roll your eyes; this stuff is material to how we earn our living.

A prospective system might drastically alter what we have now, by throwing out fee-for-service and no longer paying by the unit of the visit or the procedure, and instead using a global fee (e.g., bundling) that is geared more toward efficiency and effectiveness (i.e., use of resources and better outcomes).

On the other hand, a retrospective system might continue to pay a modified fee-for-service fee (i.e., lower than current reimbursement) with a “significant” bonus for performance (e.g., lower readmission rate, fewer visits to the ED) and improved measureable quality. Of course, this can be “new money” for quality or part of a holdback after upfront fees have been lowered.

In any event, we are probably entering an era in which hospitals and physicians will need to think of themselves as part of a “supply chain” and not just think “I did my job, so pay me.” And during this whole reshuffling of the healthcare deck, there might be calls to remove some of the inequities that have been cobbled onto the Medicare and insurance systems. For example, currently there are significant geographic disparities in Medicare reimbursement (e.g., surgery in Mississippi often is reimbursed at 50% of the same procedure in New York City or Los Angeles). And there are significant payment disparities between medical and surgical specialties and primary-care providers that the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) system has certainly not corrected.

Integration Hurdles

The small percentage of hospitals, physicians, and patients who currently are in an integrated system probably will have a smoother ride into healthcare’s new future. It is easier for Kaiser or Geisinger or HealthPartners in Minnesota to take on all of the business challenges and risks of accountability for performance and rewards for efficiency. But what about most of the rest of us?

Well, it looks as if we will need to be linked together by contracts and business relationships, by information transfer and management, and we will need strong, forward-thinking, innovative leadership. And we’ll need some trust in each other and our institutions going forward. Equally important, our patients will need to step up and into this new world. If providers and facilities are required to perform better, then patients have to stay in their contracted systems. To have accountability, patients must participate actively.

Some of you might be old enough to remember the last time integration of physicians and hospitals was all the rage. In the 1990s, the driving force was to achieve “economies of scale” and to meet the challenges of managed care with an integrated entity. Most of these attempts were expensive failures.

In 2010, the drive to integration might be the radical reworking of a payment system that is based on a global fee, a system that produces the highest quality at the lowest cost.

One caveat is that significant integration might not be possible. Do hospitals have the expertise and capacity to employ physicians to efficiently deliver care? In this recession, is the capital available to purchase and implement the information systems crucial to integrated care?

Prepared for Change

I profess to have no expertise as a prognosticator, but I do expect some significant changes to come out of Washington in 2009. The common wisdom is that we are currently spending enough in the aggregate to provide all Americans with access to healthcare, and to get better performance and less variability. That seems to mean shaping a new system.

SHM supports changes in payment methodologies that improve the quality and value of healthcare services, align incentives, and promote better clinical outcomes. We believe that healthcare pricing and quality should be transparent to patients and purchasers. We have supported the PQRI, hospital value-based purchasing, and loosening of restrictions on gainsharing between facilities and providers.

Hospitalists are positioned well. We practice in groups and often are aligned with many others in our medical staffs, and with our hospitals’ roles in our communities. We already are thinking about the value equation and trying to balance resources and performance. We are young, adaptable, and less entrenched. And we are new and have less to lose.

I am confident we can be helpful in shaping the future and can thrive in most any new environment. But hold on tight: The future is getting here way ahead of schedule. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

Even if you receive your salary as an employee of your hospital or hospitalist group, you should keep a close eye on discussions taking place in Washington about reshaping the way hospital care is paid for. It seems that every 10 to 20 years, a seismic tremor starts on Capitol Hill and fundamentally shakes up the way healthcare is funded. It starts with Medicare, then quickly is adopted by private insurers; it not only changes the distribution of dollars, but the new incentives also drive the way medicine is practiced.

In the 1960s, change began with President Johnson and the development of Medicare and Medicaid. It was the first time specific populations—seniors and the poor—were “entitled” to healthcare coverage. In essence, Johnson created the largest “insurance company” in the country, and it became the tail that wagged the dog.

In the 1970s, President Nixon pushed through support for HMOs, and capitation and managed care spread well beyond the Kaisers of the world. This system incentivized controlling costs, because the total amount was capped, while maintaining an acceptable level of quality. For the first time, doing more did not generate more money.

In the 1980s, diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) changed Medicare payments to hospitals from cost-plus billings to a bundled fee for an episode of care. This motivated hospitals to work with their physicians—sometimes driven by protocols and case managers—to efficiently manage resources and length of stay (LOS). Between capitation, case rates, and DRGs, hospitals have had to refashion themselves to be leaner and more efficient.

Today, with national thought leaders like John Wennberg and Elliot Fisher at Dartmouth and Brent James at Intermountain revealing the many variations in the way healthcare is practiced—and throwing around statistics like “40% of healthcare is wasteful”—it is no wonder that as President Obama and Congress look to add 47 million uninsured persons to the system and try to reduce variation and increase accountabilities, there is every indication that radical changes will be made to the payment system.

One of these newfangled approaches is the bundling of payment for an episode of care to include both the facility charges (e.g., hospital care) and the professional charges (e.g., physician care). Bundling can be a good thing or a worrisome approach, depending on where you sit in this dialogue and how bundling is actually implemented.

Background on Bundling

The motivation of the government—and, by extension, all insurers—is that efforts to control what they pay per unit for a visit, a procedure, or even an entire hospitalization has not curbed costs or led to a satisfactory level of performance. With respect to hospitalized patients, Obama has stated that he wants to eliminate waste by reducing unnecessary readmissions to the tune of $6.8 billion annually. Furthermore, Medicare officials want to look for strategies that either keep people out of the ED post-discharge or at least eliminate Medicare’s need to pay for this care, which they feel is unnecessary and avoidable.

By bundling payment for a specific admission (e.g., decompensated heart failure or pneumonia) and including the facility and professional-care fees, both during hospitalization and for a period of time (e.g., 30 days post-discharge) and providing incentives for best performance, the insurer (i.e., Medicare) can hand off responsibility to the hospitals and the doctors to figure it all out. There is nothing like the accountability of knowing “this is all you are going to get,” or “if you want more, you have to meet these standards,” to motivate professionals to reshape their system to improve their discharge process, engage the outpatient physicians, and do the job right the first time. This can play to HM’s strengths, and SHM already has started developing and implementing change in the discharge process through Project BOOST (Better Outcomes for Older Adults through Safe Transitions, www.hospitalmedicine.org/boost).

Potential Problems

One key concern is not knowing who—or what—will control the dollars once Medicare sets the bundled payment. Right now, hospitals receive the DRG payment and physicians bill for their own professional services. In the future, will all the money flow to the hospital? How will these dollars be distributed? Who determines who will be awarded performance bonuses?

In California and other states with significant managed-care populations and large medical groups, there is real-life experience with setting up efficient physician-hospital organizations (PHOs) to solve these issues. Some take the form of independent physician associations (IPAs), which represent the physicians in PHOs. There is no reason PHOs cannot be developed to administrate these bundled funds, and hospitalists, who are seeing an increasing number of hospitalized patients on medicine and surgery, should be key leaders in such PHO arrangements.

But HM is not a monolith in this discussion. The diversity in how HM groups are organized, their relationship with their hospitals, and how hospitalists or their groups receive funding can, and will, influence the group’s perspective on this issue. Hospitalist groups that are independent from their hospitals, or those that rely on referrals from primary-care physicians (PCPs) or the ED, might be justifiably concerned about all of “their” money having to flow through the hospital. Hospitalists who are employed by a hospital might be concerned that they will need to develop new metrics to justify their salaries and bonuses. HM groups that contract with the hospital might be concerned that a change in the flow of funding from Medicare to the hospital might make their contractual arrangements more difficult.

For those who battle with hospital administration over hospital support of their HM group, they might find bundling alleviates the need for the current use of Part A dollars to support hospitalists, because the new bundling of Part A (current payments for hospital facility charges) and Part B (current payment for physicians’ professional services) can allow for a more professional discussion, based on the value hospitalists bring. The need for subsidies or support could diminish or vanish.

Change Is Coming

No matter your perspective or viewpoint, one reality is coming into focus: This president and this Congress will make sweeping changes, and it appears from our conversations with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee (see “Medicine’s Change Agent,” May 2009, p. 18), that bundling and value-based purchasing will be part of healthcare reform.

With this in mind, SHM’s Public Policy Committee is actively engaged in trying to shape bundling in a way that fits emerging changes in the care of hospitalized patients. We want a system that works for the way healthcare will be practiced in the future, not a Band-Aid on the system of the past. This is very important stuff. Hospitalists will be affected by reform because so many of our patients are on Medicare and our compensation is generated by patient care in the hospital.

SHM has created an easy-to-use, Web-based system to send a message to members of Congress through a partnership with Capwiz. Visit www.hospitalmedicine.org/beheard to get started.

While the uncertainty of healthcare reform and, more specifically, payment reform is at times frightening, mainly because it is so sweeping and at this point so undefined, HM has been forged in the cauldron of change and ambiguity. Hospitalists are positioned as well as any health professionals to seize the opportunities that a new system will provide. And SHM will do its part to help shape the new reality and assist our members in creating successful strategies in this new environment. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

Even if you receive your salary as an employee of your hospital or hospitalist group, you should keep a close eye on discussions taking place in Washington about reshaping the way hospital care is paid for. It seems that every 10 to 20 years, a seismic tremor starts on Capitol Hill and fundamentally shakes up the way healthcare is funded. It starts with Medicare, then quickly is adopted by private insurers; it not only changes the distribution of dollars, but the new incentives also drive the way medicine is practiced.

In the 1960s, change began with President Johnson and the development of Medicare and Medicaid. It was the first time specific populations—seniors and the poor—were “entitled” to healthcare coverage. In essence, Johnson created the largest “insurance company” in the country, and it became the tail that wagged the dog.

In the 1970s, President Nixon pushed through support for HMOs, and capitation and managed care spread well beyond the Kaisers of the world. This system incentivized controlling costs, because the total amount was capped, while maintaining an acceptable level of quality. For the first time, doing more did not generate more money.

In the 1980s, diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) changed Medicare payments to hospitals from cost-plus billings to a bundled fee for an episode of care. This motivated hospitals to work with their physicians—sometimes driven by protocols and case managers—to efficiently manage resources and length of stay (LOS). Between capitation, case rates, and DRGs, hospitals have had to refashion themselves to be leaner and more efficient.

Today, with national thought leaders like John Wennberg and Elliot Fisher at Dartmouth and Brent James at Intermountain revealing the many variations in the way healthcare is practiced—and throwing around statistics like “40% of healthcare is wasteful”—it is no wonder that as President Obama and Congress look to add 47 million uninsured persons to the system and try to reduce variation and increase accountabilities, there is every indication that radical changes will be made to the payment system.

One of these newfangled approaches is the bundling of payment for an episode of care to include both the facility charges (e.g., hospital care) and the professional charges (e.g., physician care). Bundling can be a good thing or a worrisome approach, depending on where you sit in this dialogue and how bundling is actually implemented.

Background on Bundling

The motivation of the government—and, by extension, all insurers—is that efforts to control what they pay per unit for a visit, a procedure, or even an entire hospitalization has not curbed costs or led to a satisfactory level of performance. With respect to hospitalized patients, Obama has stated that he wants to eliminate waste by reducing unnecessary readmissions to the tune of $6.8 billion annually. Furthermore, Medicare officials want to look for strategies that either keep people out of the ED post-discharge or at least eliminate Medicare’s need to pay for this care, which they feel is unnecessary and avoidable.

By bundling payment for a specific admission (e.g., decompensated heart failure or pneumonia) and including the facility and professional-care fees, both during hospitalization and for a period of time (e.g., 30 days post-discharge) and providing incentives for best performance, the insurer (i.e., Medicare) can hand off responsibility to the hospitals and the doctors to figure it all out. There is nothing like the accountability of knowing “this is all you are going to get,” or “if you want more, you have to meet these standards,” to motivate professionals to reshape their system to improve their discharge process, engage the outpatient physicians, and do the job right the first time. This can play to HM’s strengths, and SHM already has started developing and implementing change in the discharge process through Project BOOST (Better Outcomes for Older Adults through Safe Transitions, www.hospitalmedicine.org/boost).

Potential Problems

One key concern is not knowing who—or what—will control the dollars once Medicare sets the bundled payment. Right now, hospitals receive the DRG payment and physicians bill for their own professional services. In the future, will all the money flow to the hospital? How will these dollars be distributed? Who determines who will be awarded performance bonuses?

In California and other states with significant managed-care populations and large medical groups, there is real-life experience with setting up efficient physician-hospital organizations (PHOs) to solve these issues. Some take the form of independent physician associations (IPAs), which represent the physicians in PHOs. There is no reason PHOs cannot be developed to administrate these bundled funds, and hospitalists, who are seeing an increasing number of hospitalized patients on medicine and surgery, should be key leaders in such PHO arrangements.

But HM is not a monolith in this discussion. The diversity in how HM groups are organized, their relationship with their hospitals, and how hospitalists or their groups receive funding can, and will, influence the group’s perspective on this issue. Hospitalist groups that are independent from their hospitals, or those that rely on referrals from primary-care physicians (PCPs) or the ED, might be justifiably concerned about all of “their” money having to flow through the hospital. Hospitalists who are employed by a hospital might be concerned that they will need to develop new metrics to justify their salaries and bonuses. HM groups that contract with the hospital might be concerned that a change in the flow of funding from Medicare to the hospital might make their contractual arrangements more difficult.

For those who battle with hospital administration over hospital support of their HM group, they might find bundling alleviates the need for the current use of Part A dollars to support hospitalists, because the new bundling of Part A (current payments for hospital facility charges) and Part B (current payment for physicians’ professional services) can allow for a more professional discussion, based on the value hospitalists bring. The need for subsidies or support could diminish or vanish.

Change Is Coming

No matter your perspective or viewpoint, one reality is coming into focus: This president and this Congress will make sweeping changes, and it appears from our conversations with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee (see “Medicine’s Change Agent,” May 2009, p. 18), that bundling and value-based purchasing will be part of healthcare reform.

With this in mind, SHM’s Public Policy Committee is actively engaged in trying to shape bundling in a way that fits emerging changes in the care of hospitalized patients. We want a system that works for the way healthcare will be practiced in the future, not a Band-Aid on the system of the past. This is very important stuff. Hospitalists will be affected by reform because so many of our patients are on Medicare and our compensation is generated by patient care in the hospital.

SHM has created an easy-to-use, Web-based system to send a message to members of Congress through a partnership with Capwiz. Visit www.hospitalmedicine.org/beheard to get started.

While the uncertainty of healthcare reform and, more specifically, payment reform is at times frightening, mainly because it is so sweeping and at this point so undefined, HM has been forged in the cauldron of change and ambiguity. Hospitalists are positioned as well as any health professionals to seize the opportunities that a new system will provide. And SHM will do its part to help shape the new reality and assist our members in creating successful strategies in this new environment. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

Even if you receive your salary as an employee of your hospital or hospitalist group, you should keep a close eye on discussions taking place in Washington about reshaping the way hospital care is paid for. It seems that every 10 to 20 years, a seismic tremor starts on Capitol Hill and fundamentally shakes up the way healthcare is funded. It starts with Medicare, then quickly is adopted by private insurers; it not only changes the distribution of dollars, but the new incentives also drive the way medicine is practiced.

In the 1960s, change began with President Johnson and the development of Medicare and Medicaid. It was the first time specific populations—seniors and the poor—were “entitled” to healthcare coverage. In essence, Johnson created the largest “insurance company” in the country, and it became the tail that wagged the dog.

In the 1970s, President Nixon pushed through support for HMOs, and capitation and managed care spread well beyond the Kaisers of the world. This system incentivized controlling costs, because the total amount was capped, while maintaining an acceptable level of quality. For the first time, doing more did not generate more money.

In the 1980s, diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) changed Medicare payments to hospitals from cost-plus billings to a bundled fee for an episode of care. This motivated hospitals to work with their physicians—sometimes driven by protocols and case managers—to efficiently manage resources and length of stay (LOS). Between capitation, case rates, and DRGs, hospitals have had to refashion themselves to be leaner and more efficient.

Today, with national thought leaders like John Wennberg and Elliot Fisher at Dartmouth and Brent James at Intermountain revealing the many variations in the way healthcare is practiced—and throwing around statistics like “40% of healthcare is wasteful”—it is no wonder that as President Obama and Congress look to add 47 million uninsured persons to the system and try to reduce variation and increase accountabilities, there is every indication that radical changes will be made to the payment system.

One of these newfangled approaches is the bundling of payment for an episode of care to include both the facility charges (e.g., hospital care) and the professional charges (e.g., physician care). Bundling can be a good thing or a worrisome approach, depending on where you sit in this dialogue and how bundling is actually implemented.

Background on Bundling

The motivation of the government—and, by extension, all insurers—is that efforts to control what they pay per unit for a visit, a procedure, or even an entire hospitalization has not curbed costs or led to a satisfactory level of performance. With respect to hospitalized patients, Obama has stated that he wants to eliminate waste by reducing unnecessary readmissions to the tune of $6.8 billion annually. Furthermore, Medicare officials want to look for strategies that either keep people out of the ED post-discharge or at least eliminate Medicare’s need to pay for this care, which they feel is unnecessary and avoidable.

By bundling payment for a specific admission (e.g., decompensated heart failure or pneumonia) and including the facility and professional-care fees, both during hospitalization and for a period of time (e.g., 30 days post-discharge) and providing incentives for best performance, the insurer (i.e., Medicare) can hand off responsibility to the hospitals and the doctors to figure it all out. There is nothing like the accountability of knowing “this is all you are going to get,” or “if you want more, you have to meet these standards,” to motivate professionals to reshape their system to improve their discharge process, engage the outpatient physicians, and do the job right the first time. This can play to HM’s strengths, and SHM already has started developing and implementing change in the discharge process through Project BOOST (Better Outcomes for Older Adults through Safe Transitions, www.hospitalmedicine.org/boost).

Potential Problems

One key concern is not knowing who—or what—will control the dollars once Medicare sets the bundled payment. Right now, hospitals receive the DRG payment and physicians bill for their own professional services. In the future, will all the money flow to the hospital? How will these dollars be distributed? Who determines who will be awarded performance bonuses?

In California and other states with significant managed-care populations and large medical groups, there is real-life experience with setting up efficient physician-hospital organizations (PHOs) to solve these issues. Some take the form of independent physician associations (IPAs), which represent the physicians in PHOs. There is no reason PHOs cannot be developed to administrate these bundled funds, and hospitalists, who are seeing an increasing number of hospitalized patients on medicine and surgery, should be key leaders in such PHO arrangements.

But HM is not a monolith in this discussion. The diversity in how HM groups are organized, their relationship with their hospitals, and how hospitalists or their groups receive funding can, and will, influence the group’s perspective on this issue. Hospitalist groups that are independent from their hospitals, or those that rely on referrals from primary-care physicians (PCPs) or the ED, might be justifiably concerned about all of “their” money having to flow through the hospital. Hospitalists who are employed by a hospital might be concerned that they will need to develop new metrics to justify their salaries and bonuses. HM groups that contract with the hospital might be concerned that a change in the flow of funding from Medicare to the hospital might make their contractual arrangements more difficult.

For those who battle with hospital administration over hospital support of their HM group, they might find bundling alleviates the need for the current use of Part A dollars to support hospitalists, because the new bundling of Part A (current payments for hospital facility charges) and Part B (current payment for physicians’ professional services) can allow for a more professional discussion, based on the value hospitalists bring. The need for subsidies or support could diminish or vanish.

Change Is Coming

No matter your perspective or viewpoint, one reality is coming into focus: This president and this Congress will make sweeping changes, and it appears from our conversations with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee (see “Medicine’s Change Agent,” May 2009, p. 18), that bundling and value-based purchasing will be part of healthcare reform.

With this in mind, SHM’s Public Policy Committee is actively engaged in trying to shape bundling in a way that fits emerging changes in the care of hospitalized patients. We want a system that works for the way healthcare will be practiced in the future, not a Band-Aid on the system of the past. This is very important stuff. Hospitalists will be affected by reform because so many of our patients are on Medicare and our compensation is generated by patient care in the hospital.

SHM has created an easy-to-use, Web-based system to send a message to members of Congress through a partnership with Capwiz. Visit www.hospitalmedicine.org/beheard to get started.

While the uncertainty of healthcare reform and, more specifically, payment reform is at times frightening, mainly because it is so sweeping and at this point so undefined, HM has been forged in the cauldron of change and ambiguity. Hospitalists are positioned as well as any health professionals to seize the opportunities that a new system will provide. And SHM will do its part to help shape the new reality and assist our members in creating successful strategies in this new environment. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

In preparation for the SHM Board Strategic Planning Retreat in November 2006, SHM performed a series of surveys to get a handle on the current and future world of hospital medicine. During this investigational process, SHM contacted leaders in hospital medicine and throughout healthcare to get their input and perspectives. In the final phases of understanding the hospital medicine landscape, SHM launched a focused survey of SHM members in fall 2006 to validate what we were hearing from our healthcare experts. Here are some of our findings.

Expectations of Hospital Medicine

While the list of these expectations can seem without end, our survey of hospitalists indicated the following expectations in order of most importance as rated by the survey respondents.

• Provide high quality patient care: At the end of the day even though hospitalists have many roles, the hallmark is to be the best at the bedside that we can be;
• Effectively communicate with other health professionals as well as patients and their families: Hospitalists have crucial information and insights. We have the responsibility to be experts in translating this knowledge so that our patients and their families have an expert partner in their healthcare. This translates into efforts in health literacy and palliative care and end-of-life care;
• Provide leadership in transitions and coordination of care: More and more often there are opportunities for fragmentation and voltage drops as patients move into and out of the hospital. But even within the hospital, the frequent handoffs by staff with shift changes or from ICU or ED to the rest of the hospital create opportunities for errors and quality drop offs. Hospitalists are expected to play a key role in minimizing these valleys in patient care and to set the standard for the institution. You will be hearing more about this in future columns as SHM takes a leadership role on a national level;
• Deliver efficient patient care with appropriate use of resources: This is the most studied aspect of hospital medicine and one trait that is accepted now without much question. Hospitalists are the first physician specialty expected to reduce resource consumption and improve the patient flow at their hospital (i.e., throughput) while improving measurable quality;
• Help hospitals meet regulatory, quality, and safety requirements: It seems that every day brings a new mandate or measurement to our nation’s hospitals. Increasingly it falls to the hospitalist to work with the hospitals and their staffs to meet these requirements. Hospitalists are becoming the de facto chief quality officers (CQOs) in many hospitals;
• Collaborate with other health professionals to form and lead multidisciplinary teams: Hospitalists know that we can’t meet this expectation alone. The day of the individual as the all-knowing solo provider of healthcare is going the way of the dinosaur. There is enough work to go around, and the enlightened hospital is figuring out how to use all the available man (and woman) power at its disposal. If we are to create the quality and efficiency we are expected to produce we will need everyone pulling in the same direction;
• Broaden the scope of hospitalist practice through co-management of patients with surgeons and other specialists: The fastest growing aspect of hospital medicine is the role of hospitalists in co-management with other physicians. The hospitalist has a role as an in-house advisor to the emergency physicians, as an “extender” of the overextended intensivists, as the perioperative manager of the medical problems of the surgical patients, and as the general physician for the acutely ill specialty patient. But this attempt to have hospitalists help everyone with everything creates opportunities for “scope creep.” Hospitalists must be helpful to the rest of the medical staff, but everyone needs to be careful to draw the lines of practice based on competence and expertise and not simply availability and convenience; and
• Be a geriatric expert for the acutely ill senior: Hospitalists are not geriatricians for the most part, but the vast majority of the patients managed by hospitalists who do care for adults are over 65. This vulnerable population has unique needs and the penalties for miscommunication or mismanagement are severe and potentially lethal. Hospitalists will need to work with geriatricians, social workers, patients’ families, and other resources to bring value to this key population of patients.

Education Niche Work

Hospitalists also are expected to play unique roles in healthcare education and the development of new knowledge. While this burden may seem to fall disproportionately on academic hospitalists, many community hospitalists also play a role here.

• Serve as a role model for residents and medical students: Much of medical education in medical school and residencies still occurs in the hospital. Hospitalists can bring the enthusiasm of being on the cutting edge of the future of healthcare to the next generation of physicians.
• Update medical education to address the training of young hospitalists and other health professionals: No one knows how large the gap between what they were taught in med school and what they are expected to perform in real time in real life is as well as hospitalists do. If hospitalists and the rest of the healthcare team are expected to improve quality performance (and measure it), mange patients efficiently, make the patient flow through the hospital go smoothly, and communicate to all stakeholders through the transitions and coordination of care, then we had better change what is taught in our professional schools; and
• Increase medical knowledge in hospital medicine through original research: Hospital medicine is a unique discipline that hopes to rely on evidence-based information. The Journal of Hospital Medicine provides a venue for displaying new information that the cadre of young hospitalist researchers will provide in health systems and quality improvement and patient safety studies.

By no means is this meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a “Top 10” (or 11) gleaned from our survey of hospitalists. This study also examined the hospitalists’ view of the difficult issues facing hospitalists and the major barriers that hospitalists face in meeting these extensive and lofty expectations. In future columns we will examine these issues and barriers. In the meantime everyone should get back to work. We still have much left to do. TH

Dr. Wellikson has been CEO of SHM since 2000.

In preparation for the SHM Board Strategic Planning Retreat in November 2006, SHM performed a series of surveys to get a handle on the current and future world of hospital medicine. During this investigational process, SHM contacted leaders in hospital medicine and throughout healthcare to get their input and perspectives. In the final phases of understanding the hospital medicine landscape, SHM launched a focused survey of SHM members in fall 2006 to validate what we were hearing from our healthcare experts. Here are some of our findings.

Expectations of Hospital Medicine

While the list of these expectations can seem without end, our survey of hospitalists indicated the following expectations in order of most importance as rated by the survey respondents.

• Provide high quality patient care: At the end of the day even though hospitalists have many roles, the hallmark is to be the best at the bedside that we can be;
• Effectively communicate with other health professionals as well as patients and their families: Hospitalists have crucial information and insights. We have the responsibility to be experts in translating this knowledge so that our patients and their families have an expert partner in their healthcare. This translates into efforts in health literacy and palliative care and end-of-life care;
• Provide leadership in transitions and coordination of care: More and more often there are opportunities for fragmentation and voltage drops as patients move into and out of the hospital. But even within the hospital, the frequent handoffs by staff with shift changes or from ICU or ED to the rest of the hospital create opportunities for errors and quality drop offs. Hospitalists are expected to play a key role in minimizing these valleys in patient care and to set the standard for the institution. You will be hearing more about this in future columns as SHM takes a leadership role on a national level;
• Deliver efficient patient care with appropriate use of resources: This is the most studied aspect of hospital medicine and one trait that is accepted now without much question. Hospitalists are the first physician specialty expected to reduce resource consumption and improve the patient flow at their hospital (i.e., throughput) while improving measurable quality;
• Help hospitals meet regulatory, quality, and safety requirements: It seems that every day brings a new mandate or measurement to our nation’s hospitals. Increasingly it falls to the hospitalist to work with the hospitals and their staffs to meet these requirements. Hospitalists are becoming the de facto chief quality officers (CQOs) in many hospitals;
• Collaborate with other health professionals to form and lead multidisciplinary teams: Hospitalists know that we can’t meet this expectation alone. The day of the individual as the all-knowing solo provider of healthcare is going the way of the dinosaur. There is enough work to go around, and the enlightened hospital is figuring out how to use all the available man (and woman) power at its disposal. If we are to create the quality and efficiency we are expected to produce we will need everyone pulling in the same direction;
• Broaden the scope of hospitalist practice through co-management of patients with surgeons and other specialists: The fastest growing aspect of hospital medicine is the role of hospitalists in co-management with other physicians. The hospitalist has a role as an in-house advisor to the emergency physicians, as an “extender” of the overextended intensivists, as the perioperative manager of the medical problems of the surgical patients, and as the general physician for the acutely ill specialty patient. But this attempt to have hospitalists help everyone with everything creates opportunities for “scope creep.” Hospitalists must be helpful to the rest of the medical staff, but everyone needs to be careful to draw the lines of practice based on competence and expertise and not simply availability and convenience; and
• Be a geriatric expert for the acutely ill senior: Hospitalists are not geriatricians for the most part, but the vast majority of the patients managed by hospitalists who do care for adults are over 65. This vulnerable population has unique needs and the penalties for miscommunication or mismanagement are severe and potentially lethal. Hospitalists will need to work with geriatricians, social workers, patients’ families, and other resources to bring value to this key population of patients.

Education Niche Work

Hospitalists also are expected to play unique roles in healthcare education and the development of new knowledge. While this burden may seem to fall disproportionately on academic hospitalists, many community hospitalists also play a role here.

• Serve as a role model for residents and medical students: Much of medical education in medical school and residencies still occurs in the hospital. Hospitalists can bring the enthusiasm of being on the cutting edge of the future of healthcare to the next generation of physicians.
• Update medical education to address the training of young hospitalists and other health professionals: No one knows how large the gap between what they were taught in med school and what they are expected to perform in real time in real life is as well as hospitalists do. If hospitalists and the rest of the healthcare team are expected to improve quality performance (and measure it), mange patients efficiently, make the patient flow through the hospital go smoothly, and communicate to all stakeholders through the transitions and coordination of care, then we had better change what is taught in our professional schools; and
• Increase medical knowledge in hospital medicine through original research: Hospital medicine is a unique discipline that hopes to rely on evidence-based information. The Journal of Hospital Medicine provides a venue for displaying new information that the cadre of young hospitalist researchers will provide in health systems and quality improvement and patient safety studies.

By no means is this meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a “Top 10” (or 11) gleaned from our survey of hospitalists. This study also examined the hospitalists’ view of the difficult issues facing hospitalists and the major barriers that hospitalists face in meeting these extensive and lofty expectations. In future columns we will examine these issues and barriers. In the meantime everyone should get back to work. We still have much left to do. TH

Dr. Wellikson has been CEO of SHM since 2000.

In preparation for the SHM Board Strategic Planning Retreat in November 2006, SHM performed a series of surveys to get a handle on the current and future world of hospital medicine. During this investigational process, SHM contacted leaders in hospital medicine and throughout healthcare to get their input and perspectives. In the final phases of understanding the hospital medicine landscape, SHM launched a focused survey of SHM members in fall 2006 to validate what we were hearing from our healthcare experts. Here are some of our findings.

Expectations of Hospital Medicine

While the list of these expectations can seem without end, our survey of hospitalists indicated the following expectations in order of most importance as rated by the survey respondents.

• Provide high quality patient care: At the end of the day even though hospitalists have many roles, the hallmark is to be the best at the bedside that we can be;
• Effectively communicate with other health professionals as well as patients and their families: Hospitalists have crucial information and insights. We have the responsibility to be experts in translating this knowledge so that our patients and their families have an expert partner in their healthcare. This translates into efforts in health literacy and palliative care and end-of-life care;
• Provide leadership in transitions and coordination of care: More and more often there are opportunities for fragmentation and voltage drops as patients move into and out of the hospital. But even within the hospital, the frequent handoffs by staff with shift changes or from ICU or ED to the rest of the hospital create opportunities for errors and quality drop offs. Hospitalists are expected to play a key role in minimizing these valleys in patient care and to set the standard for the institution. You will be hearing more about this in future columns as SHM takes a leadership role on a national level;
• Deliver efficient patient care with appropriate use of resources: This is the most studied aspect of hospital medicine and one trait that is accepted now without much question. Hospitalists are the first physician specialty expected to reduce resource consumption and improve the patient flow at their hospital (i.e., throughput) while improving measurable quality;
• Help hospitals meet regulatory, quality, and safety requirements: It seems that every day brings a new mandate or measurement to our nation’s hospitals. Increasingly it falls to the hospitalist to work with the hospitals and their staffs to meet these requirements. Hospitalists are becoming the de facto chief quality officers (CQOs) in many hospitals;
• Collaborate with other health professionals to form and lead multidisciplinary teams: Hospitalists know that we can’t meet this expectation alone. The day of the individual as the all-knowing solo provider of healthcare is going the way of the dinosaur. There is enough work to go around, and the enlightened hospital is figuring out how to use all the available man (and woman) power at its disposal. If we are to create the quality and efficiency we are expected to produce we will need everyone pulling in the same direction;
• Broaden the scope of hospitalist practice through co-management of patients with surgeons and other specialists: The fastest growing aspect of hospital medicine is the role of hospitalists in co-management with other physicians. The hospitalist has a role as an in-house advisor to the emergency physicians, as an “extender” of the overextended intensivists, as the perioperative manager of the medical problems of the surgical patients, and as the general physician for the acutely ill specialty patient. But this attempt to have hospitalists help everyone with everything creates opportunities for “scope creep.” Hospitalists must be helpful to the rest of the medical staff, but everyone needs to be careful to draw the lines of practice based on competence and expertise and not simply availability and convenience; and
• Be a geriatric expert for the acutely ill senior: Hospitalists are not geriatricians for the most part, but the vast majority of the patients managed by hospitalists who do care for adults are over 65. This vulnerable population has unique needs and the penalties for miscommunication or mismanagement are severe and potentially lethal. Hospitalists will need to work with geriatricians, social workers, patients’ families, and other resources to bring value to this key population of patients.

Education Niche Work

Hospitalists also are expected to play unique roles in healthcare education and the development of new knowledge. While this burden may seem to fall disproportionately on academic hospitalists, many community hospitalists also play a role here.

• Serve as a role model for residents and medical students: Much of medical education in medical school and residencies still occurs in the hospital. Hospitalists can bring the enthusiasm of being on the cutting edge of the future of healthcare to the next generation of physicians.
• Update medical education to address the training of young hospitalists and other health professionals: No one knows how large the gap between what they were taught in med school and what they are expected to perform in real time in real life is as well as hospitalists do. If hospitalists and the rest of the healthcare team are expected to improve quality performance (and measure it), mange patients efficiently, make the patient flow through the hospital go smoothly, and communicate to all stakeholders through the transitions and coordination of care, then we had better change what is taught in our professional schools; and
• Increase medical knowledge in hospital medicine through original research: Hospital medicine is a unique discipline that hopes to rely on evidence-based information. The Journal of Hospital Medicine provides a venue for displaying new information that the cadre of young hospitalist researchers will provide in health systems and quality improvement and patient safety studies.

By no means is this meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a “Top 10” (or 11) gleaned from our survey of hospitalists. This study also examined the hospitalists’ view of the difficult issues facing hospitalists and the major barriers that hospitalists face in meeting these extensive and lofty expectations. In future columns we will examine these issues and barriers. In the meantime everyone should get back to work. We still have much left to do. TH

Dr. Wellikson has been CEO of SHM since 2000.

It wasn’t that long ago that SHM was pretty excited to see that the word “hospitalist” had been added to the dictionary, but to have hospitalists mentioned on Oprah Winfrey’s television show, on The Today Show, and in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) all in the same week is a watershed moment. It’s further recognition that HM is part of the fabric of this country and an established specialty in America’s healthcare system.

It all started in March, when SHM President Pat Cawley, MD, was quoted in O, The Oprah Magazine, which has a circulation of more than 2 million. Later that month, Oprah had Dennis Quaid on her show to discuss the overdose of anticoagulant his newborn twins were given at a Los Angeles hospital. The conversation quickly turned to patient safety and performance expectations for hospitalized patients. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the resident medical guru for Oprah’s show, created a list of eight essential steps for hospitalized patients to take in order to have the best and safest hospital experience. No. 7 on this list was “Get to know your hospitalist.” It’s the kind of exposure that drives 10,000 to 20,000 people to go online and discover hospitalists.

That same week, The Today Show featured Geno Merli, MD, chief medical officer at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, an SHM member, and our representative to the Coalition to Prevent DVT (www.preventDVT.org). Dr. Merli discussed deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE) prevention, as well as efforts to engage patients and their physicians in this effort. SHM has assumed a leadership role in this 60-group coalition, which is providing DVT awareness to millions of people.

And to top off a banner week, NEJM ran a story and editorial about the rapid growth of HM, based on a study analyzing Medicare data from 1997 to 2006. In “Growth in the Care of Older Patients by Hospitalists in the United States,” by Kuo et al, the main finding was the very rapid growth of HM. The editorial authors noted “the odds that a Medicare patient would be cared for by a hospitalist grew by 29% per year from 1997 through 2006.”

The cherry on the sundae was when other media outlets followed up on the Oprah story, and even more jumped on the NEJM article. Hundreds of media outlets seized the opportunity to tout the growth of HM and our role in patient safety and performance improvement. The reach of these messages, through a national consumer audience and through a prestigious medical journal, should not be underestimated. SHM couldn’t buy that kind of message and deliver it to our patients and their families.

No Slowing Down

It was interesting that I was at SHM’s Leadership Academy in Hawaii when all the stories broke, which made it seem more tangible and brought it home on a personal level as a hospitalist. Just being around 120 current and future HM leaders made me realize that we have the manpower (and womanpower) to continue to create the needed change for our health system.

Hospitalist leaders took a week off from their overwhelming, day-to-day responsibilities to learn how to be more effective leaders. This is the ninth time SHM has brought together more than 100 hospitalist leaders, and every time, we find bright, young—and some not-so-young—hospitalists who thirst for direction to manage their group of hospitalists, to create a team of health professionals, to reshape and fix the hospitals they work in, to move from volume to value, and to do all of the hundreds of other things hospitalist leaders get handed to them every day.

The energy in our specialty will also be felt at HM09. Despite the recession and the recent falloff in attendance at many medical meetings, SHM’s annual meeting—the largest gathering in HM, which will occur in Chicago this month—is having its best registration ever. More than 2,000 stakeholders will come together to network, train to be a better hospitalist, and learn how to effect real change at their hospitals.

As President Obama has mentioned time and again, there are plenty of companies and organizations that continue to produce the products and services that Americans want and need, and even though we are in tough times, those organizations will prevail. Hospitalists clearly are in demand. Even in tough economic times, hospitals, medical staffs, and our patients continue to look to us for answers.

HM is growing exponentially, even when many still know little about hospitalists and what we do. With voices like Oprah, Today, and NEJM highlighting our good work, more light will be shed on our specialty. And I believe we are ready for the scrutiny and the recognition.

Hospitalists earn their keep by taking over a greater share of the management of the acutely ill patient, in working with our primary-care physician, subspecialty, and surgical colleagues, and by being strong team members with our allied health professionals. In many ways, HM remains a work in progress. Although we have accomplished much in a little more than a decade, our best days are still ahead of us.

Just turn on the TV or open a magazine to hear all about it. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

It wasn’t that long ago that SHM was pretty excited to see that the word “hospitalist” had been added to the dictionary, but to have hospitalists mentioned on Oprah Winfrey’s television show, on The Today Show, and in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) all in the same week is a watershed moment. It’s further recognition that HM is part of the fabric of this country and an established specialty in America’s healthcare system.

It all started in March, when SHM President Pat Cawley, MD, was quoted in O, The Oprah Magazine, which has a circulation of more than 2 million. Later that month, Oprah had Dennis Quaid on her show to discuss the overdose of anticoagulant his newborn twins were given at a Los Angeles hospital. The conversation quickly turned to patient safety and performance expectations for hospitalized patients. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the resident medical guru for Oprah’s show, created a list of eight essential steps for hospitalized patients to take in order to have the best and safest hospital experience. No. 7 on this list was “Get to know your hospitalist.” It’s the kind of exposure that drives 10,000 to 20,000 people to go online and discover hospitalists.

That same week, The Today Show featured Geno Merli, MD, chief medical officer at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, an SHM member, and our representative to the Coalition to Prevent DVT (www.preventDVT.org). Dr. Merli discussed deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE) prevention, as well as efforts to engage patients and their physicians in this effort. SHM has assumed a leadership role in this 60-group coalition, which is providing DVT awareness to millions of people.

And to top off a banner week, NEJM ran a story and editorial about the rapid growth of HM, based on a study analyzing Medicare data from 1997 to 2006. In “Growth in the Care of Older Patients by Hospitalists in the United States,” by Kuo et al, the main finding was the very rapid growth of HM. The editorial authors noted “the odds that a Medicare patient would be cared for by a hospitalist grew by 29% per year from 1997 through 2006.”

The cherry on the sundae was when other media outlets followed up on the Oprah story, and even more jumped on the NEJM article. Hundreds of media outlets seized the opportunity to tout the growth of HM and our role in patient safety and performance improvement. The reach of these messages, through a national consumer audience and through a prestigious medical journal, should not be underestimated. SHM couldn’t buy that kind of message and deliver it to our patients and their families.

No Slowing Down

It was interesting that I was at SHM’s Leadership Academy in Hawaii when all the stories broke, which made it seem more tangible and brought it home on a personal level as a hospitalist. Just being around 120 current and future HM leaders made me realize that we have the manpower (and womanpower) to continue to create the needed change for our health system.

Hospitalist leaders took a week off from their overwhelming, day-to-day responsibilities to learn how to be more effective leaders. This is the ninth time SHM has brought together more than 100 hospitalist leaders, and every time, we find bright, young—and some not-so-young—hospitalists who thirst for direction to manage their group of hospitalists, to create a team of health professionals, to reshape and fix the hospitals they work in, to move from volume to value, and to do all of the hundreds of other things hospitalist leaders get handed to them every day.

The energy in our specialty will also be felt at HM09. Despite the recession and the recent falloff in attendance at many medical meetings, SHM’s annual meeting—the largest gathering in HM, which will occur in Chicago this month—is having its best registration ever. More than 2,000 stakeholders will come together to network, train to be a better hospitalist, and learn how to effect real change at their hospitals.

As President Obama has mentioned time and again, there are plenty of companies and organizations that continue to produce the products and services that Americans want and need, and even though we are in tough times, those organizations will prevail. Hospitalists clearly are in demand. Even in tough economic times, hospitals, medical staffs, and our patients continue to look to us for answers.

HM is growing exponentially, even when many still know little about hospitalists and what we do. With voices like Oprah, Today, and NEJM highlighting our good work, more light will be shed on our specialty. And I believe we are ready for the scrutiny and the recognition.

Hospitalists earn their keep by taking over a greater share of the management of the acutely ill patient, in working with our primary-care physician, subspecialty, and surgical colleagues, and by being strong team members with our allied health professionals. In many ways, HM remains a work in progress. Although we have accomplished much in a little more than a decade, our best days are still ahead of us.

Just turn on the TV or open a magazine to hear all about it. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

It wasn’t that long ago that SHM was pretty excited to see that the word “hospitalist” had been added to the dictionary, but to have hospitalists mentioned on Oprah Winfrey’s television show, on The Today Show, and in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) all in the same week is a watershed moment. It’s further recognition that HM is part of the fabric of this country and an established specialty in America’s healthcare system.

It all started in March, when SHM President Pat Cawley, MD, was quoted in O, The Oprah Magazine, which has a circulation of more than 2 million. Later that month, Oprah had Dennis Quaid on her show to discuss the overdose of anticoagulant his newborn twins were given at a Los Angeles hospital. The conversation quickly turned to patient safety and performance expectations for hospitalized patients. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the resident medical guru for Oprah’s show, created a list of eight essential steps for hospitalized patients to take in order to have the best and safest hospital experience. No. 7 on this list was “Get to know your hospitalist.” It’s the kind of exposure that drives 10,000 to 20,000 people to go online and discover hospitalists.

That same week, The Today Show featured Geno Merli, MD, chief medical officer at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, an SHM member, and our representative to the Coalition to Prevent DVT (www.preventDVT.org). Dr. Merli discussed deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE) prevention, as well as efforts to engage patients and their physicians in this effort. SHM has assumed a leadership role in this 60-group coalition, which is providing DVT awareness to millions of people.

And to top off a banner week, NEJM ran a story and editorial about the rapid growth of HM, based on a study analyzing Medicare data from 1997 to 2006. In “Growth in the Care of Older Patients by Hospitalists in the United States,” by Kuo et al, the main finding was the very rapid growth of HM. The editorial authors noted “the odds that a Medicare patient would be cared for by a hospitalist grew by 29% per year from 1997 through 2006.”

The cherry on the sundae was when other media outlets followed up on the Oprah story, and even more jumped on the NEJM article. Hundreds of media outlets seized the opportunity to tout the growth of HM and our role in patient safety and performance improvement. The reach of these messages, through a national consumer audience and through a prestigious medical journal, should not be underestimated. SHM couldn’t buy that kind of message and deliver it to our patients and their families.

No Slowing Down

It was interesting that I was at SHM’s Leadership Academy in Hawaii when all the stories broke, which made it seem more tangible and brought it home on a personal level as a hospitalist. Just being around 120 current and future HM leaders made me realize that we have the manpower (and womanpower) to continue to create the needed change for our health system.

Hospitalist leaders took a week off from their overwhelming, day-to-day responsibilities to learn how to be more effective leaders. This is the ninth time SHM has brought together more than 100 hospitalist leaders, and every time, we find bright, young—and some not-so-young—hospitalists who thirst for direction to manage their group of hospitalists, to create a team of health professionals, to reshape and fix the hospitals they work in, to move from volume to value, and to do all of the hundreds of other things hospitalist leaders get handed to them every day.

The energy in our specialty will also be felt at HM09. Despite the recession and the recent falloff in attendance at many medical meetings, SHM’s annual meeting—the largest gathering in HM, which will occur in Chicago this month—is having its best registration ever. More than 2,000 stakeholders will come together to network, train to be a better hospitalist, and learn how to effect real change at their hospitals.

As President Obama has mentioned time and again, there are plenty of companies and organizations that continue to produce the products and services that Americans want and need, and even though we are in tough times, those organizations will prevail. Hospitalists clearly are in demand. Even in tough economic times, hospitals, medical staffs, and our patients continue to look to us for answers.

HM is growing exponentially, even when many still know little about hospitalists and what we do. With voices like Oprah, Today, and NEJM highlighting our good work, more light will be shed on our specialty. And I believe we are ready for the scrutiny and the recognition.

Hospitalists earn their keep by taking over a greater share of the management of the acutely ill patient, in working with our primary-care physician, subspecialty, and surgical colleagues, and by being strong team members with our allied health professionals. In many ways, HM remains a work in progress. Although we have accomplished much in a little more than a decade, our best days are still ahead of us.

Just turn on the TV or open a magazine to hear all about it. TH

Dr. Wellikson is CEO of SHM.

On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will become the 44th President of the United States against the backdrop of two foreign wars and one of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. U.S. business icons are failing; unemployment is at its highest rate in decades; housing values are plummeting as foreclosures and credit tightening make the American dream of home ownership more of a nightmare than a reality. Personal net worth is shrinking and the financial ability for some to even consider retirement is fading away.

Yet, at the same time there is dire need to structure and re-invent many institutions. Our infrastructure of roads, buildings, and bridges has been neglected and are in disrepair. Our education system is not preparing our young people for a global market, a place where the best and brightest may now be found in India, Japan, Europe, and China, as much as in the U.S.

And healthcare, my oh my healthcare, needs more than just a face lift; it needs an overhaul, a righting of the ship, and a truing up of its direction for the future.

Yet, fixing healthcare is very much intermingled with the rest of our economic woes. With company failures and layoffs comes the loss of health benefits, and, ironically, more time available to seek healthcare. Even those with jobs may find themselves with no insurance or inadequate coverage. It is not unlikely the current 47 million uninsured will soon be joined by another 15 million uninsured or underinsured, made up mostly of middle-class workers who have never before been faced with the prospect of financial ruin if they or their family members take ill. Never before has the middle class been faced with the choice between the right care they need and losing all of their net worth, including their homes.

President Obama could be another Jimmy Carter, an intelligent, well-meaning man whose presidency was disabled by 13% inflation, gas lines, and being held hostage in Iran. Or he will be the next FDR, a president who remade America for generations to come, with Social Security, work programs, and a new economy.

Fortunately, Obama’s team is loaded with thought leaders who come with a strong interest in reforming and rebuilding healthcare. Tom Daschle, the new secretary of Health and Human Services has a long history of healthcare policy and can work well to move things through a Democratic Congress. Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, is a well-regarded health policy expert. Melody Barnes, his domestic policy advisor, was the executive director of a think tank, the Center for American Progress, which has developed a detailed road map for change in our healthcare system, involving some of the best minds in American healthcare, such as Don Berwick, David Blumenthal and Paul Ginsburg. You can read the center’s 120-page report at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/10/health_care_delivery.html.

While this group appears primed for a revolution, rather than just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, at this point Obama and his team have been more visionary than specific. Here is my best guess as to what some of the aspects of a new healthcare approach might be. (And most of these changes are of more than a passing interest to hospital medicine.)

Less Uninsured

There is no doubt it is unsustainable for a first-class society to have so many citizens without access and payment for healthcare. Although this may start with covering all children and offering people affordable insurance not specifically tied to their employment, the U.S. must move closer to something that looks like Medicare for all. Along the way, this will lead to more regulation of insurance companies to raise the percentage of the premium dollar that actually goes for medical care (75% is just not tolerable). Do not expect the $2.1 trillion healthcare pie to expand, so doctors and hospitals will need to be more efficient and effective as they supply better, more accountable healthcare to a larger patient population. Some may perceive this as more work for less pay.

This expansion of coverage, however, cannot be a broadening of Medicaid and its dysfunctional payment system. It cannot be a single-payer, Canadian system, which creates irrational rationing and does nothing to address the need to bolster primary care. We need a new health paradigm where performance and access mean just as much as new technology.

More Primary Care

What good is insurance if you have no access? Just ask the citizens of Massachusetts, where the newly insured can’t find a primary care physician (PCP). One “benefit” of the economic downturn and stock market tumble is late-career PCPs can’t afford to retire. But primary care is in shambles, and throwing a few more dollars at PCPs or creating a “home” won’t make being a PCP more attractive to medical students. For a more revolutionary approach, check out the New England Journal of Medicine video roundtable (www.nejm.org/perspective/primary-care-video/?query=TOC) to hear of a “new” primary care model, which is more centered on population management than a series of 10-minute visits. Hospitalists, as much as anyone, need a strong, sustainable primary care partnership, if we are to tackle the difficult problems inside the hospital.

Value-Based Purchasing

This new payment model is being pushed by Sen. Max Baucas (D-Mont.), the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Value-based purchasing (VBP) basically moves us away from just paying for care by the unit of the visit or the procedure, regardless of medical necessity or outcome. This plays into the strengths of hospital medicine where performance and communication are valued. Paying more when the customer gets more is an American value, which, at times, has been overlooked in American medicine. It is time we brought VBP into the healthcare equation.

Bundled Payment

All politics is local, and in many ways all healthcare is local. By changing the payment for hospital care to a composite fee for the facility and all the health professionals, an opportunity exists for the physicians and the hospital at a local level to creatively reward work, performance, outcomes, and patient satisfaction. This is not giving the hospital the entire fee, but more relying on a physician-hospital organization (as currently exists in many places in the country) deciding how to allocate resources. Once again, hospitalists are managing up to 80% of inpatients at some hospitals, so we are right in the middle of a new distribution of compensation for inpatient care.

Transitions of Care

It is time to look at our healthcare system from the patient’s point of view. It is not enough to perform the surgery perfectly or order the correct treatment. Patients need to be involved in their care, to clearly understand what medications they should be taking, to know who is responsible to answer their questions, and what their expectations for recovery should be. It also is an opportunity to prevent unnecessary visits back to the emergency room or readmissions to the hospital. The current, 15% readmission rate within 30 days for Medicare patients points to how broken the system is. Patients deserve accountability, transparency and clarity on their terms.

Once again, SHM and hospitalists have taken the lead in this issue. With a grant from the Hartford Foundation, SHM already has demonstrated practical strategies to improve the discharge process.

What It Means to You

In calmer, less-chaotic times, I suspect there would be calls for tinkering around the edges. But these are dangerous times that call for decisive, some might say, disruptive change. A new, patient-centered healthcare system based on access, inclusiveness, performance, communication, and safety is coming. There will be those who feel less well-off in the new order—insurance companies, some physicians and some hospitals—but there will be many who feel, for the first time, that the system is equitable, open, and responsive to their needs. The latter group includes U.S. business, some physicians (e.g. hospitalists), some hospitals, and, most importantly, the American people.

Hospitalists are uniquely positioned to shoulder the full force of this change. Hospitalists now practice in most hospitals throughout the country, and they are right at the intersection of the patient and the illness, thrown into the caldron of change along with allied health and our institutions. We must embrace change and we mold it into a new system of care, a system that benefits our patients based on data, evidence, and compassion. There is an outcome where hospitalists and our patients both win; it is the future, and now it seems closer to reality. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will become the 44th President of the United States against the backdrop of two foreign wars and one of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. U.S. business icons are failing; unemployment is at its highest rate in decades; housing values are plummeting as foreclosures and credit tightening make the American dream of home ownership more of a nightmare than a reality. Personal net worth is shrinking and the financial ability for some to even consider retirement is fading away.

Yet, at the same time there is dire need to structure and re-invent many institutions. Our infrastructure of roads, buildings, and bridges has been neglected and are in disrepair. Our education system is not preparing our young people for a global market, a place where the best and brightest may now be found in India, Japan, Europe, and China, as much as in the U.S.

And healthcare, my oh my healthcare, needs more than just a face lift; it needs an overhaul, a righting of the ship, and a truing up of its direction for the future.

Yet, fixing healthcare is very much intermingled with the rest of our economic woes. With company failures and layoffs comes the loss of health benefits, and, ironically, more time available to seek healthcare. Even those with jobs may find themselves with no insurance or inadequate coverage. It is not unlikely the current 47 million uninsured will soon be joined by another 15 million uninsured or underinsured, made up mostly of middle-class workers who have never before been faced with the prospect of financial ruin if they or their family members take ill. Never before has the middle class been faced with the choice between the right care they need and losing all of their net worth, including their homes.

President Obama could be another Jimmy Carter, an intelligent, well-meaning man whose presidency was disabled by 13% inflation, gas lines, and being held hostage in Iran. Or he will be the next FDR, a president who remade America for generations to come, with Social Security, work programs, and a new economy.

Fortunately, Obama’s team is loaded with thought leaders who come with a strong interest in reforming and rebuilding healthcare. Tom Daschle, the new secretary of Health and Human Services has a long history of healthcare policy and can work well to move things through a Democratic Congress. Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, is a well-regarded health policy expert. Melody Barnes, his domestic policy advisor, was the executive director of a think tank, the Center for American Progress, which has developed a detailed road map for change in our healthcare system, involving some of the best minds in American healthcare, such as Don Berwick, David Blumenthal and Paul Ginsburg. You can read the center’s 120-page report at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/10/health_care_delivery.html.

While this group appears primed for a revolution, rather than just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, at this point Obama and his team have been more visionary than specific. Here is my best guess as to what some of the aspects of a new healthcare approach might be. (And most of these changes are of more than a passing interest to hospital medicine.)

Less Uninsured

There is no doubt it is unsustainable for a first-class society to have so many citizens without access and payment for healthcare. Although this may start with covering all children and offering people affordable insurance not specifically tied to their employment, the U.S. must move closer to something that looks like Medicare for all. Along the way, this will lead to more regulation of insurance companies to raise the percentage of the premium dollar that actually goes for medical care (75% is just not tolerable). Do not expect the $2.1 trillion healthcare pie to expand, so doctors and hospitals will need to be more efficient and effective as they supply better, more accountable healthcare to a larger patient population. Some may perceive this as more work for less pay.

This expansion of coverage, however, cannot be a broadening of Medicaid and its dysfunctional payment system. It cannot be a single-payer, Canadian system, which creates irrational rationing and does nothing to address the need to bolster primary care. We need a new health paradigm where performance and access mean just as much as new technology.

More Primary Care

What good is insurance if you have no access? Just ask the citizens of Massachusetts, where the newly insured can’t find a primary care physician (PCP). One “benefit” of the economic downturn and stock market tumble is late-career PCPs can’t afford to retire. But primary care is in shambles, and throwing a few more dollars at PCPs or creating a “home” won’t make being a PCP more attractive to medical students. For a more revolutionary approach, check out the New England Journal of Medicine video roundtable (www.nejm.org/perspective/primary-care-video/?query=TOC) to hear of a “new” primary care model, which is more centered on population management than a series of 10-minute visits. Hospitalists, as much as anyone, need a strong, sustainable primary care partnership, if we are to tackle the difficult problems inside the hospital.

Value-Based Purchasing

This new payment model is being pushed by Sen. Max Baucas (D-Mont.), the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Value-based purchasing (VBP) basically moves us away from just paying for care by the unit of the visit or the procedure, regardless of medical necessity or outcome. This plays into the strengths of hospital medicine where performance and communication are valued. Paying more when the customer gets more is an American value, which, at times, has been overlooked in American medicine. It is time we brought VBP into the healthcare equation.

Bundled Payment

All politics is local, and in many ways all healthcare is local. By changing the payment for hospital care to a composite fee for the facility and all the health professionals, an opportunity exists for the physicians and the hospital at a local level to creatively reward work, performance, outcomes, and patient satisfaction. This is not giving the hospital the entire fee, but more relying on a physician-hospital organization (as currently exists in many places in the country) deciding how to allocate resources. Once again, hospitalists are managing up to 80% of inpatients at some hospitals, so we are right in the middle of a new distribution of compensation for inpatient care.

Transitions of Care

It is time to look at our healthcare system from the patient’s point of view. It is not enough to perform the surgery perfectly or order the correct treatment. Patients need to be involved in their care, to clearly understand what medications they should be taking, to know who is responsible to answer their questions, and what their expectations for recovery should be. It also is an opportunity to prevent unnecessary visits back to the emergency room or readmissions to the hospital. The current, 15% readmission rate within 30 days for Medicare patients points to how broken the system is. Patients deserve accountability, transparency and clarity on their terms.

Once again, SHM and hospitalists have taken the lead in this issue. With a grant from the Hartford Foundation, SHM already has demonstrated practical strategies to improve the discharge process.

What It Means to You

In calmer, less-chaotic times, I suspect there would be calls for tinkering around the edges. But these are dangerous times that call for decisive, some might say, disruptive change. A new, patient-centered healthcare system based on access, inclusiveness, performance, communication, and safety is coming. There will be those who feel less well-off in the new order—insurance companies, some physicians and some hospitals—but there will be many who feel, for the first time, that the system is equitable, open, and responsive to their needs. The latter group includes U.S. business, some physicians (e.g. hospitalists), some hospitals, and, most importantly, the American people.

Hospitalists are uniquely positioned to shoulder the full force of this change. Hospitalists now practice in most hospitals throughout the country, and they are right at the intersection of the patient and the illness, thrown into the caldron of change along with allied health and our institutions. We must embrace change and we mold it into a new system of care, a system that benefits our patients based on data, evidence, and compassion. There is an outcome where hospitalists and our patients both win; it is the future, and now it seems closer to reality. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will become the 44th President of the United States against the backdrop of two foreign wars and one of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. U.S. business icons are failing; unemployment is at its highest rate in decades; housing values are plummeting as foreclosures and credit tightening make the American dream of home ownership more of a nightmare than a reality. Personal net worth is shrinking and the financial ability for some to even consider retirement is fading away.

Yet, at the same time there is dire need to structure and re-invent many institutions. Our infrastructure of roads, buildings, and bridges has been neglected and are in disrepair. Our education system is not preparing our young people for a global market, a place where the best and brightest may now be found in India, Japan, Europe, and China, as much as in the U.S.

And healthcare, my oh my healthcare, needs more than just a face lift; it needs an overhaul, a righting of the ship, and a truing up of its direction for the future.

Yet, fixing healthcare is very much intermingled with the rest of our economic woes. With company failures and layoffs comes the loss of health benefits, and, ironically, more time available to seek healthcare. Even those with jobs may find themselves with no insurance or inadequate coverage. It is not unlikely the current 47 million uninsured will soon be joined by another 15 million uninsured or underinsured, made up mostly of middle-class workers who have never before been faced with the prospect of financial ruin if they or their family members take ill. Never before has the middle class been faced with the choice between the right care they need and losing all of their net worth, including their homes.

President Obama could be another Jimmy Carter, an intelligent, well-meaning man whose presidency was disabled by 13% inflation, gas lines, and being held hostage in Iran. Or he will be the next FDR, a president who remade America for generations to come, with Social Security, work programs, and a new economy.

Fortunately, Obama’s team is loaded with thought leaders who come with a strong interest in reforming and rebuilding healthcare. Tom Daschle, the new secretary of Health and Human Services has a long history of healthcare policy and can work well to move things through a Democratic Congress. Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, is a well-regarded health policy expert. Melody Barnes, his domestic policy advisor, was the executive director of a think tank, the Center for American Progress, which has developed a detailed road map for change in our healthcare system, involving some of the best minds in American healthcare, such as Don Berwick, David Blumenthal and Paul Ginsburg. You can read the center’s 120-page report at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/10/health_care_delivery.html.

While this group appears primed for a revolution, rather than just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, at this point Obama and his team have been more visionary than specific. Here is my best guess as to what some of the aspects of a new healthcare approach might be. (And most of these changes are of more than a passing interest to hospital medicine.)

Less Uninsured

There is no doubt it is unsustainable for a first-class society to have so many citizens without access and payment for healthcare. Although this may start with covering all children and offering people affordable insurance not specifically tied to their employment, the U.S. must move closer to something that looks like Medicare for all. Along the way, this will lead to more regulation of insurance companies to raise the percentage of the premium dollar that actually goes for medical care (75% is just not tolerable). Do not expect the $2.1 trillion healthcare pie to expand, so doctors and hospitals will need to be more efficient and effective as they supply better, more accountable healthcare to a larger patient population. Some may perceive this as more work for less pay.

This expansion of coverage, however, cannot be a broadening of Medicaid and its dysfunctional payment system. It cannot be a single-payer, Canadian system, which creates irrational rationing and does nothing to address the need to bolster primary care. We need a new health paradigm where performance and access mean just as much as new technology.

More Primary Care

What good is insurance if you have no access? Just ask the citizens of Massachusetts, where the newly insured can’t find a primary care physician (PCP). One “benefit” of the economic downturn and stock market tumble is late-career PCPs can’t afford to retire. But primary care is in shambles, and throwing a few more dollars at PCPs or creating a “home” won’t make being a PCP more attractive to medical students. For a more revolutionary approach, check out the New England Journal of Medicine video roundtable (www.nejm.org/perspective/primary-care-video/?query=TOC) to hear of a “new” primary care model, which is more centered on population management than a series of 10-minute visits. Hospitalists, as much as anyone, need a strong, sustainable primary care partnership, if we are to tackle the difficult problems inside the hospital.

Value-Based Purchasing

This new payment model is being pushed by Sen. Max Baucas (D-Mont.), the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Value-based purchasing (VBP) basically moves us away from just paying for care by the unit of the visit or the procedure, regardless of medical necessity or outcome. This plays into the strengths of hospital medicine where performance and communication are valued. Paying more when the customer gets more is an American value, which, at times, has been overlooked in American medicine. It is time we brought VBP into the healthcare equation.

Bundled Payment

All politics is local, and in many ways all healthcare is local. By changing the payment for hospital care to a composite fee for the facility and all the health professionals, an opportunity exists for the physicians and the hospital at a local level to creatively reward work, performance, outcomes, and patient satisfaction. This is not giving the hospital the entire fee, but more relying on a physician-hospital organization (as currently exists in many places in the country) deciding how to allocate resources. Once again, hospitalists are managing up to 80% of inpatients at some hospitals, so we are right in the middle of a new distribution of compensation for inpatient care.

Transitions of Care

It is time to look at our healthcare system from the patient’s point of view. It is not enough to perform the surgery perfectly or order the correct treatment. Patients need to be involved in their care, to clearly understand what medications they should be taking, to know who is responsible to answer their questions, and what their expectations for recovery should be. It also is an opportunity to prevent unnecessary visits back to the emergency room or readmissions to the hospital. The current, 15% readmission rate within 30 days for Medicare patients points to how broken the system is. Patients deserve accountability, transparency and clarity on their terms.

Once again, SHM and hospitalists have taken the lead in this issue. With a grant from the Hartford Foundation, SHM already has demonstrated practical strategies to improve the discharge process.

What It Means to You

In calmer, less-chaotic times, I suspect there would be calls for tinkering around the edges. But these are dangerous times that call for decisive, some might say, disruptive change. A new, patient-centered healthcare system based on access, inclusiveness, performance, communication, and safety is coming. There will be those who feel less well-off in the new order—insurance companies, some physicians and some hospitals—but there will be many who feel, for the first time, that the system is equitable, open, and responsive to their needs. The latter group includes U.S. business, some physicians (e.g. hospitalists), some hospitals, and, most importantly, the American people.

Hospitalists are uniquely positioned to shoulder the full force of this change. Hospitalists now practice in most hospitals throughout the country, and they are right at the intersection of the patient and the illness, thrown into the caldron of change along with allied health and our institutions. We must embrace change and we mold it into a new system of care, a system that benefits our patients based on data, evidence, and compassion. There is an outcome where hospitalists and our patients both win; it is the future, and now it seems closer to reality. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

I have been spending quite a lot of time “outside” of hospital medicine recently. I have spoken to a group of hospital CEOs in New York about the hospital of the future, and I have created a Webcast for hospital executives for the Ohio Hospital Association. Society of Hospital Medicine staff and I have met with senior leaders at the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE) and the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) regarding partnerships with SHM and hospitalists. We have worked with the critical care societies about a common approach to the “never events” that Medicare has been proposing. And we have met with the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP) about the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) that they hope will transform primary care.

There are common themes that seem to percolate through many of these meetings. Hospitalists are now practicing at many of our nation’s hospitals. More importantly, as medical care and hospital-based care are being transformed, hospitalists are central to this change on many levels.

Change is taking the form of new payment models. Medicare’s decision not to pay for conditions that are not present on admission (POA) and that should never (or rarely) occur in the hospital is driving hospital CEOs to change their hospital’s culture and processes out of financial necessity. This is a huge step up the quality improvement ladder from one or two patient safety nurses with clipboards and a checklist “documenting” that a specific quality improvement measure has been met. These changes might transform the very way hospitals view themselves and their critical mission. The new payment model will affect how hospitals are rewarded and perceived by their communities and, in the end, will change their business.

It is clear that hospital CEOs think pay for performance has been a distraction, bringing about no additional funding and failing to arouse hospital leadership to move forward to significantly improve clinical performance. It appears rewarding key hospital executives based on patient satisfaction scores, along with publishing hospital specific information in Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) data on the internet, has been more effective in driving tangible change at many hospitals.

More radical approaches are being considered in Washington. Some would fundamentally change the way payment flows to hospitals (and doctors). Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the group that determines Medicare funding, has held hearings on value based purchasing (VBP). SHM leaders have been there and testified. MedPAC, which advises Congress and Medicare, also is considering VBP as one of its recommendations for the future of payment reform. At its core, VBP would move away from simply paying because a visit was made or a procedure was performed to rewarding documented performance and outcomes.

VBP plays to the strengths of the mature hospital medicine group, where data collection, analysis, systems improvement, and change leadership are part of our DNA. It moves hospitalists from simply replacing the clinical roles previously performed by other physicians, be it primary care physicians (PCPs) or surgeons or subspecialists, to partnering with their hospitals and allied health team members to change the culture and performance of their institutions. This moves hospital medicine from a subsidized health profession to a core group of clinicians central to the hospital’s mission, reputation, and financial future.

Other payment changes, including bundling of both the facility fee (Medicare Part A) and the professional fee (Medicare Part B), further plants the hospitalist group firmly in the middle of hospital funding and allocation of manpower. Bundled payments would not necessarily flow to the hospital to distribute to the physicians, but more likely would be managed by a joint physician-hospital partnership. The entire enterprise (doctors and the hospital) would be rewarded for efficient and effective care (i.e., using the appropriate resources to generate the best outcomes.) Decisions would need to be made and negotiated to allocate funds to the hospital and to each physician who participated in the patient’s care, based on time, skill, and performance. With hospitalists taking an important role in most inpatient care, one can see how central they will be in this new system of payment.

But it would be naïve to think that today all hospitalists are ready to step up to the new challenges brought on by payment reform and the increasing demand for documented performance improvement and patient safety. That is where SHM and some of the partnerships we are entertaining come in.

SHM has seen hospitalists coming out of their residency training or from a previous practice mode entering hospital medicine as a career with enthusiasm and drive, but needing key new skills if they are to step up to and into new roles as change leaders at their hospitals. With this in mind, SHM has created our Practice Management Institute with training in starting, managing, growing, and improving a hospital medicine group, including front-end skills in billing and collecting, as well as dashboards for data collection and analysis, and taking the hospitalist enterprise to the next level.

Knowing that helping create the next generation of hospital medicine leaders and hospital leaders is a key competency for hospital medicine, SHM’s successful Leadership Academy already has started nearly 1,000 hospital medicine leaders in the right direction in the last four years. Understanding the growing need for trained leaders in quality improvement and patient safety, SHM has been providing courses for quality improvement leaders, as well as practical implementation tools and strategies in quality improvement and patient safety in Web based resource rooms, as well as mentored implementation strategies and expert training that gets results on a local level on the fronts lines where care is delivered and results matter.

Several things are clear right now.

• Hospital CEOs, the rest of the C-suite, medical staffs, and allied health recognize that hospitalists are not only part of their medical landscape, but a potential partner in many of the acute care changes coming to their hospitals.
• We are moving to a time where there is more action than talk about changing the way hospitals and their doctors are paid and what level of performance is expected, to a time where CMS and the Blues are making incremental changes that will reshape the way hospitals function.
• While the first steps may be CMS not paying for “never events” or CEO compensation being tied to patient satisfaction, more likely sooner than later we will see coverage for the 47 million uninsured, a revamping of primary care, a shift to value based purchasing, and with a bundling of payment for inpatient care.
• Some who are near the end of their professional careers may have the luxury of playing out the string and waiting out any changes. For hospitalists who are by and large at the beginning of their careers, and by the very virtue of their practice styles right smack in the middle of the hospital, literally and figuratively, this is not a choice but a destiny. We need to embrace change, prepare for our role, and create a future that works for our patients, our health communities, and ourselves.

And that is why SHM is seeking partners who can accelerate our production of training and strategies for our hospitalists on the front lines. It is why we are talking to hospitals at the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the C-suite at American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and in New York and in Ohio and in the publications they read. It is why SHM is meeting with the PCP community at ACP and AAFP, and why we are trying to shape the rules of the road in quality improvement and patient safety at the ABIM and other certifying boards, at the Joint Commission, National Quality Forum (NQF), and the AMA’s Physician Consortium on Performance Improvement (PCPI). It is why we are looking to the MGMA and the ACPE and others who have a track record of educating, measuring, and credentialing physician leaders and administrators to help SHM craft the next set of resources you need.

There is no status quo any longer in health care. You are either moving forward or out of date and out of touch. Hospital medicine was born into these times of change (some would even say bred because of the necessity to do things differently.) This is our calling and our destiny. This won’t be easy. It never is. And SHM will be with you every step of the way. Just continue to tell us what you need and we will look for innovative ways to do our part on this incredible journey. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

I have been spending quite a lot of time “outside” of hospital medicine recently. I have spoken to a group of hospital CEOs in New York about the hospital of the future, and I have created a Webcast for hospital executives for the Ohio Hospital Association. Society of Hospital Medicine staff and I have met with senior leaders at the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE) and the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) regarding partnerships with SHM and hospitalists. We have worked with the critical care societies about a common approach to the “never events” that Medicare has been proposing. And we have met with the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP) about the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) that they hope will transform primary care.

There are common themes that seem to percolate through many of these meetings. Hospitalists are now practicing at many of our nation’s hospitals. More importantly, as medical care and hospital-based care are being transformed, hospitalists are central to this change on many levels.

Change is taking the form of new payment models. Medicare’s decision not to pay for conditions that are not present on admission (POA) and that should never (or rarely) occur in the hospital is driving hospital CEOs to change their hospital’s culture and processes out of financial necessity. This is a huge step up the quality improvement ladder from one or two patient safety nurses with clipboards and a checklist “documenting” that a specific quality improvement measure has been met. These changes might transform the very way hospitals view themselves and their critical mission. The new payment model will affect how hospitals are rewarded and perceived by their communities and, in the end, will change their business.

It is clear that hospital CEOs think pay for performance has been a distraction, bringing about no additional funding and failing to arouse hospital leadership to move forward to significantly improve clinical performance. It appears rewarding key hospital executives based on patient satisfaction scores, along with publishing hospital specific information in Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) data on the internet, has been more effective in driving tangible change at many hospitals.

More radical approaches are being considered in Washington. Some would fundamentally change the way payment flows to hospitals (and doctors). Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the group that determines Medicare funding, has held hearings on value based purchasing (VBP). SHM leaders have been there and testified. MedPAC, which advises Congress and Medicare, also is considering VBP as one of its recommendations for the future of payment reform. At its core, VBP would move away from simply paying because a visit was made or a procedure was performed to rewarding documented performance and outcomes.

VBP plays to the strengths of the mature hospital medicine group, where data collection, analysis, systems improvement, and change leadership are part of our DNA. It moves hospitalists from simply replacing the clinical roles previously performed by other physicians, be it primary care physicians (PCPs) or surgeons or subspecialists, to partnering with their hospitals and allied health team members to change the culture and performance of their institutions. This moves hospital medicine from a subsidized health profession to a core group of clinicians central to the hospital’s mission, reputation, and financial future.

Other payment changes, including bundling of both the facility fee (Medicare Part A) and the professional fee (Medicare Part B), further plants the hospitalist group firmly in the middle of hospital funding and allocation of manpower. Bundled payments would not necessarily flow to the hospital to distribute to the physicians, but more likely would be managed by a joint physician-hospital partnership. The entire enterprise (doctors and the hospital) would be rewarded for efficient and effective care (i.e., using the appropriate resources to generate the best outcomes.) Decisions would need to be made and negotiated to allocate funds to the hospital and to each physician who participated in the patient’s care, based on time, skill, and performance. With hospitalists taking an important role in most inpatient care, one can see how central they will be in this new system of payment.

But it would be naïve to think that today all hospitalists are ready to step up to the new challenges brought on by payment reform and the increasing demand for documented performance improvement and patient safety. That is where SHM and some of the partnerships we are entertaining come in.

SHM has seen hospitalists coming out of their residency training or from a previous practice mode entering hospital medicine as a career with enthusiasm and drive, but needing key new skills if they are to step up to and into new roles as change leaders at their hospitals. With this in mind, SHM has created our Practice Management Institute with training in starting, managing, growing, and improving a hospital medicine group, including front-end skills in billing and collecting, as well as dashboards for data collection and analysis, and taking the hospitalist enterprise to the next level.

Knowing that helping create the next generation of hospital medicine leaders and hospital leaders is a key competency for hospital medicine, SHM’s successful Leadership Academy already has started nearly 1,000 hospital medicine leaders in the right direction in the last four years. Understanding the growing need for trained leaders in quality improvement and patient safety, SHM has been providing courses for quality improvement leaders, as well as practical implementation tools and strategies in quality improvement and patient safety in Web based resource rooms, as well as mentored implementation strategies and expert training that gets results on a local level on the fronts lines where care is delivered and results matter.

Several things are clear right now.

• Hospital CEOs, the rest of the C-suite, medical staffs, and allied health recognize that hospitalists are not only part of their medical landscape, but a potential partner in many of the acute care changes coming to their hospitals.
• We are moving to a time where there is more action than talk about changing the way hospitals and their doctors are paid and what level of performance is expected, to a time where CMS and the Blues are making incremental changes that will reshape the way hospitals function.
• While the first steps may be CMS not paying for “never events” or CEO compensation being tied to patient satisfaction, more likely sooner than later we will see coverage for the 47 million uninsured, a revamping of primary care, a shift to value based purchasing, and with a bundling of payment for inpatient care.
• Some who are near the end of their professional careers may have the luxury of playing out the string and waiting out any changes. For hospitalists who are by and large at the beginning of their careers, and by the very virtue of their practice styles right smack in the middle of the hospital, literally and figuratively, this is not a choice but a destiny. We need to embrace change, prepare for our role, and create a future that works for our patients, our health communities, and ourselves.

And that is why SHM is seeking partners who can accelerate our production of training and strategies for our hospitalists on the front lines. It is why we are talking to hospitals at the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the C-suite at American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and in New York and in Ohio and in the publications they read. It is why SHM is meeting with the PCP community at ACP and AAFP, and why we are trying to shape the rules of the road in quality improvement and patient safety at the ABIM and other certifying boards, at the Joint Commission, National Quality Forum (NQF), and the AMA’s Physician Consortium on Performance Improvement (PCPI). It is why we are looking to the MGMA and the ACPE and others who have a track record of educating, measuring, and credentialing physician leaders and administrators to help SHM craft the next set of resources you need.

There is no status quo any longer in health care. You are either moving forward or out of date and out of touch. Hospital medicine was born into these times of change (some would even say bred because of the necessity to do things differently.) This is our calling and our destiny. This won’t be easy. It never is. And SHM will be with you every step of the way. Just continue to tell us what you need and we will look for innovative ways to do our part on this incredible journey. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

I have been spending quite a lot of time “outside” of hospital medicine recently. I have spoken to a group of hospital CEOs in New York about the hospital of the future, and I have created a Webcast for hospital executives for the Ohio Hospital Association. Society of Hospital Medicine staff and I have met with senior leaders at the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE) and the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) regarding partnerships with SHM and hospitalists. We have worked with the critical care societies about a common approach to the “never events” that Medicare has been proposing. And we have met with the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP) about the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) that they hope will transform primary care.

There are common themes that seem to percolate through many of these meetings. Hospitalists are now practicing at many of our nation’s hospitals. More importantly, as medical care and hospital-based care are being transformed, hospitalists are central to this change on many levels.

Change is taking the form of new payment models. Medicare’s decision not to pay for conditions that are not present on admission (POA) and that should never (or rarely) occur in the hospital is driving hospital CEOs to change their hospital’s culture and processes out of financial necessity. This is a huge step up the quality improvement ladder from one or two patient safety nurses with clipboards and a checklist “documenting” that a specific quality improvement measure has been met. These changes might transform the very way hospitals view themselves and their critical mission. The new payment model will affect how hospitals are rewarded and perceived by their communities and, in the end, will change their business.

It is clear that hospital CEOs think pay for performance has been a distraction, bringing about no additional funding and failing to arouse hospital leadership to move forward to significantly improve clinical performance. It appears rewarding key hospital executives based on patient satisfaction scores, along with publishing hospital specific information in Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) data on the internet, has been more effective in driving tangible change at many hospitals.

More radical approaches are being considered in Washington. Some would fundamentally change the way payment flows to hospitals (and doctors). Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the group that determines Medicare funding, has held hearings on value based purchasing (VBP). SHM leaders have been there and testified. MedPAC, which advises Congress and Medicare, also is considering VBP as one of its recommendations for the future of payment reform. At its core, VBP would move away from simply paying because a visit was made or a procedure was performed to rewarding documented performance and outcomes.

VBP plays to the strengths of the mature hospital medicine group, where data collection, analysis, systems improvement, and change leadership are part of our DNA. It moves hospitalists from simply replacing the clinical roles previously performed by other physicians, be it primary care physicians (PCPs) or surgeons or subspecialists, to partnering with their hospitals and allied health team members to change the culture and performance of their institutions. This moves hospital medicine from a subsidized health profession to a core group of clinicians central to the hospital’s mission, reputation, and financial future.

Other payment changes, including bundling of both the facility fee (Medicare Part A) and the professional fee (Medicare Part B), further plants the hospitalist group firmly in the middle of hospital funding and allocation of manpower. Bundled payments would not necessarily flow to the hospital to distribute to the physicians, but more likely would be managed by a joint physician-hospital partnership. The entire enterprise (doctors and the hospital) would be rewarded for efficient and effective care (i.e., using the appropriate resources to generate the best outcomes.) Decisions would need to be made and negotiated to allocate funds to the hospital and to each physician who participated in the patient’s care, based on time, skill, and performance. With hospitalists taking an important role in most inpatient care, one can see how central they will be in this new system of payment.

But it would be naïve to think that today all hospitalists are ready to step up to the new challenges brought on by payment reform and the increasing demand for documented performance improvement and patient safety. That is where SHM and some of the partnerships we are entertaining come in.

SHM has seen hospitalists coming out of their residency training or from a previous practice mode entering hospital medicine as a career with enthusiasm and drive, but needing key new skills if they are to step up to and into new roles as change leaders at their hospitals. With this in mind, SHM has created our Practice Management Institute with training in starting, managing, growing, and improving a hospital medicine group, including front-end skills in billing and collecting, as well as dashboards for data collection and analysis, and taking the hospitalist enterprise to the next level.

Knowing that helping create the next generation of hospital medicine leaders and hospital leaders is a key competency for hospital medicine, SHM’s successful Leadership Academy already has started nearly 1,000 hospital medicine leaders in the right direction in the last four years. Understanding the growing need for trained leaders in quality improvement and patient safety, SHM has been providing courses for quality improvement leaders, as well as practical implementation tools and strategies in quality improvement and patient safety in Web based resource rooms, as well as mentored implementation strategies and expert training that gets results on a local level on the fronts lines where care is delivered and results matter.

Several things are clear right now.

• Hospital CEOs, the rest of the C-suite, medical staffs, and allied health recognize that hospitalists are not only part of their medical landscape, but a potential partner in many of the acute care changes coming to their hospitals.
• We are moving to a time where there is more action than talk about changing the way hospitals and their doctors are paid and what level of performance is expected, to a time where CMS and the Blues are making incremental changes that will reshape the way hospitals function.
• While the first steps may be CMS not paying for “never events” or CEO compensation being tied to patient satisfaction, more likely sooner than later we will see coverage for the 47 million uninsured, a revamping of primary care, a shift to value based purchasing, and with a bundling of payment for inpatient care.
• Some who are near the end of their professional careers may have the luxury of playing out the string and waiting out any changes. For hospitalists who are by and large at the beginning of their careers, and by the very virtue of their practice styles right smack in the middle of the hospital, literally and figuratively, this is not a choice but a destiny. We need to embrace change, prepare for our role, and create a future that works for our patients, our health communities, and ourselves.

And that is why SHM is seeking partners who can accelerate our production of training and strategies for our hospitalists on the front lines. It is why we are talking to hospitals at the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the C-suite at American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and in New York and in Ohio and in the publications they read. It is why SHM is meeting with the PCP community at ACP and AAFP, and why we are trying to shape the rules of the road in quality improvement and patient safety at the ABIM and other certifying boards, at the Joint Commission, National Quality Forum (NQF), and the AMA’s Physician Consortium on Performance Improvement (PCPI). It is why we are looking to the MGMA and the ACPE and others who have a track record of educating, measuring, and credentialing physician leaders and administrators to help SHM craft the next set of resources you need.

There is no status quo any longer in health care. You are either moving forward or out of date and out of touch. Hospital medicine was born into these times of change (some would even say bred because of the necessity to do things differently.) This is our calling and our destiny. This won’t be easy. It never is. And SHM will be with you every step of the way. Just continue to tell us what you need and we will look for innovative ways to do our part on this incredible journey. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

Hospitalists have been concerned about the entire continuum of care from the early days of the hospital medicine movement. We have tried to look at the system of healthcare from the patients’ viewpoint, where an admission to the hospital is rare in the larger scheme of their healthcare and their interaction with a variety of physicians and health professionals.

Hospitalists will always need to rely on our professional relationships with surgeons and specialists, as well as with the primary care physicians (PCPs) who refer their patients for admission to the hospital and who partner with us to resume patient care at discharge.

With this fundamental backdrop, two interesting trends in the PCP world—the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) and PCPs’ use of performance measurements to drive referrals to hospitals and specialists—will have a profound effect on hospitalists, the patients we treat, and the systems of care in which we work.

PCMH and Hospitalists

For many years, the problems in primary care have been virtually ignored and dismissed by the insurance industry—and even by most of organized medicine. As if a light has suddenly been turned on, everyone now wants to “do something” to save primary care.

One of the latest “solutions’ is the PCMH. As we all know, ideas without funding are just ideas. It’s time to take note of PCMH. Why? Because insurance companies and Medicare are paying for a variety of pilot and demonstration projects to see how PCMH might play out in real-life interactions among patients and physicians.

The main new characteristics in the PCMH (as opposed to the traditional PCP) are a more robust information system and the commitment of personnel and organization within the PCP practice to allow proactive coordination of the patient’s care. The hope on the performance side is that patients will receive better care that will lead to better patient satisfaction and better outcomes. On the payment side, the PCP must receive significant monetary support to pay for the staff and equipment to coordinate and manage their patient’s journey through an increasingly complex series of tests, referrals, and treatments.

Accountability

SHM has tried to raise the issues of how the PCMH would relate to hospitalists at key junctures in the hospitalization continuum. Hopefully this will lead to a dialogue with the PCP community about how PCMH proposals would meet the goals of defining accountability and responsibility for the PCMH and for hospitalists. In turn this would lead to a better, safer system for our patients.

While discussions have specifically focused on the PCMH-hospitalist interface, many of the same tenets of accountability, responsibility, timeliness, and information transfer would apply to the PCMH-specialist interfaces.

Time of Admission

Accurate, timely information is crucial at the time of acute illness. It would be expected that at the time of the patient’s arrival at the hospital the following set of data elements would be available to the hospitalist (and/or emergency department physician or specialist). These elements are lifted directly from the joint SHM-ACP-SGIM Transitions of Care Consensus document from 2007 (available at www.hospitalmedicine.org): principle diagnosis and problem list; medication list (reconciliation), including over-the-counter and herbal products, allergies, and drug interactions; emergency plan and contact number and person; treatment and diagnostic plan; prognosis and goals of care; test results/pending results; clearly identifies medical home and/or transferring coordinating physician/institution; patient’s cognitive status; advance directives, power of attorney, consent; planned interventions, durable medical equipment, wound care; and assessment of caregiver status.

Time of Discharge

While it is clear that the hospitalist is responsible for overseeing the patient’s care while hospitalized, it is essential for patients and their families to know who will be accountable at the time of discharge. SHM proposes that the PCMH:

• Assume the primary role of caring for the patient as of the time of discharge from the hospital;
• Provide a timely first post-discharge office visit consistent with the acute illness as documented in the discharge summary; and
• Ensure a handoff formally confirmed and documented by the hospitalist and PCMH.

The hospitalist should provide to the PCMH:

• An accurate and timely discharge summary; and
• The availability to the PCMH to answer questions about the hospitalization.

Further, discharge summaries should include:

• Primary and secondary diagnoses;
• Pertinent history and physical findings;
• Dates of hospitalization, treatment provided, brief hospital course;
• Results of procedures and abnormal laboratory tests;
• Recommendations of any subspecialty consultants;
• Information given to the patient and family;
• The patient’s condition or functional status at discharge;
• Reconciled discharge medication regimen, with reasons for any changes and indications for newly prescribed medications;
• Details of follow-up arrangements made;
• Specific follow-up needs, including appointments or procedures to be scheduled, and tests pending at the time of discharge; and
• Name and contact information of the responsible hospital physician.1

Other Considerations

Obviously other aspects of the PCMH-hospitalist relationship must be considered, including when the PCMH would like to be informed (or involved) during their patient’s hospitalization, as well as how to manage the handoff of responsibilities and information when the patient leaves the hospital but does not go directly home (e.g., when they are sent to a skilled nursing facility or rehabilitation center). If we continue to look at solutions from the patient’s and family’s points of view, we can come up with a workable solution.

Performance-driven Referral

Part of the result of the growth of the hospital medicine movement is that, increasingly, PCPs are not directly managing their patients for acute illnesses. That said, the PCP still has a significant role in determining whether their patients get the best care available—even if other physicians (e.g., hospitalists, surgeons, subspecialists) deliver the actual care.

We are just at the beginning of performance measurement and reporting. Today, PCPs and their patients can log on to www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov and look at any hospital’s performance for pneumonia, acute coronary syndrome, and heart failure. The era of disease-specific and institution-specific—even physician-specific—reporting grows on a seemingly monthly basis.

Armed with this information, the PCP’s role shifts from managing the acute illnesses of their patients to understanding the report cards on their local hospitals and specialists and using this information to direct their patients to the hospitals and physicians who have the best outcomes. The expanding role of the PCP as the informed guide for their patients further will drive hospitals and all physicians who rely on referrals to improve their feedback and communication with PCPs.

We will begin to see that best-of-breed hospitals not only will have excellent clinical outcomes but will be pushed to have better patient-satisfaction and PCP-satisfaction scores. This is an opportunity for enlightened PCPs to use their medical background and hands-on understanding of local healthcare to be a vital resource to their patients.

By the same token, this is an opportunity for product differentiation for hospitals and their hospitalists to reshape a healthcare referral world traditionally built more on geography and familiarity than on information and performance, and replace it with strong communication and better outcomes. The best thing about this approach is the patient wins. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

Reference

1. Kripalani S, LeFevre F, Phillips CO, et al. Deficits in communication and information transfer between hospital-based and primary care physicians: implications for patient safety and continuity of care. JAMA. 2007 Feb 28;297(8):831-841.

Hospitalists have been concerned about the entire continuum of care from the early days of the hospital medicine movement. We have tried to look at the system of healthcare from the patients’ viewpoint, where an admission to the hospital is rare in the larger scheme of their healthcare and their interaction with a variety of physicians and health professionals.

Hospitalists will always need to rely on our professional relationships with surgeons and specialists, as well as with the primary care physicians (PCPs) who refer their patients for admission to the hospital and who partner with us to resume patient care at discharge.

With this fundamental backdrop, two interesting trends in the PCP world—the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) and PCPs’ use of performance measurements to drive referrals to hospitals and specialists—will have a profound effect on hospitalists, the patients we treat, and the systems of care in which we work.

PCMH and Hospitalists

For many years, the problems in primary care have been virtually ignored and dismissed by the insurance industry—and even by most of organized medicine. As if a light has suddenly been turned on, everyone now wants to “do something” to save primary care.

One of the latest “solutions’ is the PCMH. As we all know, ideas without funding are just ideas. It’s time to take note of PCMH. Why? Because insurance companies and Medicare are paying for a variety of pilot and demonstration projects to see how PCMH might play out in real-life interactions among patients and physicians.

The main new characteristics in the PCMH (as opposed to the traditional PCP) are a more robust information system and the commitment of personnel and organization within the PCP practice to allow proactive coordination of the patient’s care. The hope on the performance side is that patients will receive better care that will lead to better patient satisfaction and better outcomes. On the payment side, the PCP must receive significant monetary support to pay for the staff and equipment to coordinate and manage their patient’s journey through an increasingly complex series of tests, referrals, and treatments.

Accountability

SHM has tried to raise the issues of how the PCMH would relate to hospitalists at key junctures in the hospitalization continuum. Hopefully this will lead to a dialogue with the PCP community about how PCMH proposals would meet the goals of defining accountability and responsibility for the PCMH and for hospitalists. In turn this would lead to a better, safer system for our patients.

While discussions have specifically focused on the PCMH-hospitalist interface, many of the same tenets of accountability, responsibility, timeliness, and information transfer would apply to the PCMH-specialist interfaces.

Time of Admission

Accurate, timely information is crucial at the time of acute illness. It would be expected that at the time of the patient’s arrival at the hospital the following set of data elements would be available to the hospitalist (and/or emergency department physician or specialist). These elements are lifted directly from the joint SHM-ACP-SGIM Transitions of Care Consensus document from 2007 (available at www.hospitalmedicine.org): principle diagnosis and problem list; medication list (reconciliation), including over-the-counter and herbal products, allergies, and drug interactions; emergency plan and contact number and person; treatment and diagnostic plan; prognosis and goals of care; test results/pending results; clearly identifies medical home and/or transferring coordinating physician/institution; patient’s cognitive status; advance directives, power of attorney, consent; planned interventions, durable medical equipment, wound care; and assessment of caregiver status.

Time of Discharge

While it is clear that the hospitalist is responsible for overseeing the patient’s care while hospitalized, it is essential for patients and their families to know who will be accountable at the time of discharge. SHM proposes that the PCMH:

• Assume the primary role of caring for the patient as of the time of discharge from the hospital;
• Provide a timely first post-discharge office visit consistent with the acute illness as documented in the discharge summary; and
• Ensure a handoff formally confirmed and documented by the hospitalist and PCMH.

The hospitalist should provide to the PCMH:

• An accurate and timely discharge summary; and
• The availability to the PCMH to answer questions about the hospitalization.

Further, discharge summaries should include:

• Primary and secondary diagnoses;
• Pertinent history and physical findings;
• Dates of hospitalization, treatment provided, brief hospital course;
• Results of procedures and abnormal laboratory tests;
• Recommendations of any subspecialty consultants;
• Information given to the patient and family;
• The patient’s condition or functional status at discharge;
• Reconciled discharge medication regimen, with reasons for any changes and indications for newly prescribed medications;
• Details of follow-up arrangements made;
• Specific follow-up needs, including appointments or procedures to be scheduled, and tests pending at the time of discharge; and
• Name and contact information of the responsible hospital physician.1

Other Considerations

Obviously other aspects of the PCMH-hospitalist relationship must be considered, including when the PCMH would like to be informed (or involved) during their patient’s hospitalization, as well as how to manage the handoff of responsibilities and information when the patient leaves the hospital but does not go directly home (e.g., when they are sent to a skilled nursing facility or rehabilitation center). If we continue to look at solutions from the patient’s and family’s points of view, we can come up with a workable solution.

Performance-driven Referral

Part of the result of the growth of the hospital medicine movement is that, increasingly, PCPs are not directly managing their patients for acute illnesses. That said, the PCP still has a significant role in determining whether their patients get the best care available—even if other physicians (e.g., hospitalists, surgeons, subspecialists) deliver the actual care.

We are just at the beginning of performance measurement and reporting. Today, PCPs and their patients can log on to www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov and look at any hospital’s performance for pneumonia, acute coronary syndrome, and heart failure. The era of disease-specific and institution-specific—even physician-specific—reporting grows on a seemingly monthly basis.

Armed with this information, the PCP’s role shifts from managing the acute illnesses of their patients to understanding the report cards on their local hospitals and specialists and using this information to direct their patients to the hospitals and physicians who have the best outcomes. The expanding role of the PCP as the informed guide for their patients further will drive hospitals and all physicians who rely on referrals to improve their feedback and communication with PCPs.

We will begin to see that best-of-breed hospitals not only will have excellent clinical outcomes but will be pushed to have better patient-satisfaction and PCP-satisfaction scores. This is an opportunity for enlightened PCPs to use their medical background and hands-on understanding of local healthcare to be a vital resource to their patients.

By the same token, this is an opportunity for product differentiation for hospitals and their hospitalists to reshape a healthcare referral world traditionally built more on geography and familiarity than on information and performance, and replace it with strong communication and better outcomes. The best thing about this approach is the patient wins. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

Reference

1. Kripalani S, LeFevre F, Phillips CO, et al. Deficits in communication and information transfer between hospital-based and primary care physicians: implications for patient safety and continuity of care. JAMA. 2007 Feb 28;297(8):831-841.

Hospitalists have been concerned about the entire continuum of care from the early days of the hospital medicine movement. We have tried to look at the system of healthcare from the patients’ viewpoint, where an admission to the hospital is rare in the larger scheme of their healthcare and their interaction with a variety of physicians and health professionals.

Hospitalists will always need to rely on our professional relationships with surgeons and specialists, as well as with the primary care physicians (PCPs) who refer their patients for admission to the hospital and who partner with us to resume patient care at discharge.

With this fundamental backdrop, two interesting trends in the PCP world—the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) and PCPs’ use of performance measurements to drive referrals to hospitals and specialists—will have a profound effect on hospitalists, the patients we treat, and the systems of care in which we work.

PCMH and Hospitalists

For many years, the problems in primary care have been virtually ignored and dismissed by the insurance industry—and even by most of organized medicine. As if a light has suddenly been turned on, everyone now wants to “do something” to save primary care.

One of the latest “solutions’ is the PCMH. As we all know, ideas without funding are just ideas. It’s time to take note of PCMH. Why? Because insurance companies and Medicare are paying for a variety of pilot and demonstration projects to see how PCMH might play out in real-life interactions among patients and physicians.

The main new characteristics in the PCMH (as opposed to the traditional PCP) are a more robust information system and the commitment of personnel and organization within the PCP practice to allow proactive coordination of the patient’s care. The hope on the performance side is that patients will receive better care that will lead to better patient satisfaction and better outcomes. On the payment side, the PCP must receive significant monetary support to pay for the staff and equipment to coordinate and manage their patient’s journey through an increasingly complex series of tests, referrals, and treatments.

Accountability

SHM has tried to raise the issues of how the PCMH would relate to hospitalists at key junctures in the hospitalization continuum. Hopefully this will lead to a dialogue with the PCP community about how PCMH proposals would meet the goals of defining accountability and responsibility for the PCMH and for hospitalists. In turn this would lead to a better, safer system for our patients.

While discussions have specifically focused on the PCMH-hospitalist interface, many of the same tenets of accountability, responsibility, timeliness, and information transfer would apply to the PCMH-specialist interfaces.

Time of Admission

Accurate, timely information is crucial at the time of acute illness. It would be expected that at the time of the patient’s arrival at the hospital the following set of data elements would be available to the hospitalist (and/or emergency department physician or specialist). These elements are lifted directly from the joint SHM-ACP-SGIM Transitions of Care Consensus document from 2007 (available at www.hospitalmedicine.org): principle diagnosis and problem list; medication list (reconciliation), including over-the-counter and herbal products, allergies, and drug interactions; emergency plan and contact number and person; treatment and diagnostic plan; prognosis and goals of care; test results/pending results; clearly identifies medical home and/or transferring coordinating physician/institution; patient’s cognitive status; advance directives, power of attorney, consent; planned interventions, durable medical equipment, wound care; and assessment of caregiver status.

Time of Discharge

While it is clear that the hospitalist is responsible for overseeing the patient’s care while hospitalized, it is essential for patients and their families to know who will be accountable at the time of discharge. SHM proposes that the PCMH:

• Assume the primary role of caring for the patient as of the time of discharge from the hospital;
• Provide a timely first post-discharge office visit consistent with the acute illness as documented in the discharge summary; and
• Ensure a handoff formally confirmed and documented by the hospitalist and PCMH.

The hospitalist should provide to the PCMH:

• An accurate and timely discharge summary; and
• The availability to the PCMH to answer questions about the hospitalization.

Further, discharge summaries should include:

• Primary and secondary diagnoses;
• Pertinent history and physical findings;
• Dates of hospitalization, treatment provided, brief hospital course;
• Results of procedures and abnormal laboratory tests;
• Recommendations of any subspecialty consultants;
• Information given to the patient and family;
• The patient’s condition or functional status at discharge;
• Reconciled discharge medication regimen, with reasons for any changes and indications for newly prescribed medications;
• Details of follow-up arrangements made;
• Specific follow-up needs, including appointments or procedures to be scheduled, and tests pending at the time of discharge; and
• Name and contact information of the responsible hospital physician.1

Other Considerations

Obviously other aspects of the PCMH-hospitalist relationship must be considered, including when the PCMH would like to be informed (or involved) during their patient’s hospitalization, as well as how to manage the handoff of responsibilities and information when the patient leaves the hospital but does not go directly home (e.g., when they are sent to a skilled nursing facility or rehabilitation center). If we continue to look at solutions from the patient’s and family’s points of view, we can come up with a workable solution.

Performance-driven Referral

Part of the result of the growth of the hospital medicine movement is that, increasingly, PCPs are not directly managing their patients for acute illnesses. That said, the PCP still has a significant role in determining whether their patients get the best care available—even if other physicians (e.g., hospitalists, surgeons, subspecialists) deliver the actual care.

We are just at the beginning of performance measurement and reporting. Today, PCPs and their patients can log on to www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov and look at any hospital’s performance for pneumonia, acute coronary syndrome, and heart failure. The era of disease-specific and institution-specific—even physician-specific—reporting grows on a seemingly monthly basis.

Armed with this information, the PCP’s role shifts from managing the acute illnesses of their patients to understanding the report cards on their local hospitals and specialists and using this information to direct their patients to the hospitals and physicians who have the best outcomes. The expanding role of the PCP as the informed guide for their patients further will drive hospitals and all physicians who rely on referrals to improve their feedback and communication with PCPs.

We will begin to see that best-of-breed hospitals not only will have excellent clinical outcomes but will be pushed to have better patient-satisfaction and PCP-satisfaction scores. This is an opportunity for enlightened PCPs to use their medical background and hands-on understanding of local healthcare to be a vital resource to their patients.

By the same token, this is an opportunity for product differentiation for hospitals and their hospitalists to reshape a healthcare referral world traditionally built more on geography and familiarity than on information and performance, and replace it with strong communication and better outcomes. The best thing about this approach is the patient wins. TH

Dr. Wellikson is the CEO of SHM

Reference

1. Kripalani S, LeFevre F, Phillips CO, et al. Deficits in communication and information transfer between hospital-based and primary care physicians: implications for patient safety and continuity of care. JAMA. 2007 Feb 28;297(8):831-841.