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Richard Quinn is an award-winning journalist with 15 years’ experience. He has worked at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., and currently is managing editor for a leading commercial real estate publication. His freelance work has appeared in The Jewish State, The Hospitalist, The Rheumatologist, ACEP Now, and ENT Today. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and three cats.
Meet the two newest SHM board members
SHM’s two newest board members – pediatric hospitalist Kris Rehm, MD, SFHM, and perioperative specialist Rachel Thompson, MD, MPH, SFHM – will bring their expertise to bear on the society’s top panel.
However, neither woman sees her role as shaping the board. In fact, they see themselves as lucky to be joining the team.
“I really want to hear everyone’s voice, and I hope to see how we can all move to better places together,” added Dr. Rehm, associate professor of clinical pediatrics and director of the division of hospital medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Both board members were officially seated for three-year terms at HM17 in Las Vegas. They replace former SHM president Robert Harrington, MD, SFHM, and veteran pediatric hospitalist Erin Stucky Fisher, MD, MHM.
Each of the new board members brings a strong perspective to the panel.
For Dr. Thompson, that viewpoint is based in engagement. She is the former chair of SHM’s Pacific Northwest chapter and has spent the past few years leading the perioperative issues for the society’s work group.
“We get to a certain point of our career as hospitalists, and if we’re just plugging in and working, doing our shifts, somewhere in that 8- to 10-year range, we might get a little bored, tired, worn out,” Dr. Thompson said. “I believe, if we have the community and professional home to keep us engaged, that helps us see the value in what we’re doing every day. It helps us continue to grow, so we don’t hit that wall.”
Given Dr. Thompson’s involvement both with her chapter and the society’s chapter support committee, she will likely continue that effort to make sure SHM’s board sees the value of encouraging and partnering with local chapters. She will also work with SHM president Ron Greeno, MD, FCCP, MHM, on policy issues, as her background in public health has aligned her interests on health care reform and other headwinds facing the specialty.
“I went in to do my masters in public health with the idea that I wanted to build the skill set so that I could be more analytical in how I approach our problem solving, our discovery in the hospital setting,” she said. “It really speaks to a part of me that has always been interested in finding ways to prevent illness and moving beyond that reactivity that we have in medicine into a prevention-based [approach].”
Dr. Thompson noted that her background in perioperative medicine helps her work as part of a team because it “entirely relies on collaboration and coordination of care, which is pretty much the basis of what we do in the hospital any day.”
Dr. Rehm, who serves as a pediatric hospitalist at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, said she will also bring a teamwork-focused perspective to the SHM board.
She could be expected to view everything through the lens of inpatient pediatrics, but that’s not her style.
“I think we have so many similarities and so many things that [pediatric and adult hospitalists] can partner to do together,” she said. “We all are involved in, for example, medication reconciliation or discharge-management planning or postacute care follow-up. There’s a lot of synergy, and I think we can learn so much from each other.”
Dr. Rehm, who chairs SHM’s Pediatrics Committee and the 2017 Pediatric Hospital Medicine meeting, pointed out that working well with others is a natural skill set for hospitalists.
“Collaboration is probably my biggest skill set and that of many hospital medicine providers,” she said. “I think I do that in my job here at Vanderbilt in thinking about complicated patients that requirement multiple subspecialists and in bringing together people to figure out the question at hand. That is definitely my leadership style.”
If Dr. Rehm has one goal on the board, it is to become a little bit more like Dr. Thompson and focus on chapter development for pediatric hospitalists.
“I’m really interested in engaging with members to better understand the struggles on the front line so that we can make sure that, as an organization, we’re offering a brand of things that our membership needs,” she said. “So, I’m really looking forward to becoming more involved in the chapter engagement and development. The Nashville chapter is getting re-engaged now and I’m excited to be involved.”
To prepare for her debut board meeting in Las Vegas, Dr. Rehm attended SHM board meetings at the group’s Philadelphia headquarters over the past two years.
“I’ve been lucky enough to attend the fall board meeting in Philadelphia and observe the board in action, and I think that has helped me get to know some of the current board members and to have a little bit of a vision of what the meetings will be like,” she said.
SHM’s two newest board members – pediatric hospitalist Kris Rehm, MD, SFHM, and perioperative specialist Rachel Thompson, MD, MPH, SFHM – will bring their expertise to bear on the society’s top panel.
However, neither woman sees her role as shaping the board. In fact, they see themselves as lucky to be joining the team.
“I really want to hear everyone’s voice, and I hope to see how we can all move to better places together,” added Dr. Rehm, associate professor of clinical pediatrics and director of the division of hospital medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Both board members were officially seated for three-year terms at HM17 in Las Vegas. They replace former SHM president Robert Harrington, MD, SFHM, and veteran pediatric hospitalist Erin Stucky Fisher, MD, MHM.
Each of the new board members brings a strong perspective to the panel.
For Dr. Thompson, that viewpoint is based in engagement. She is the former chair of SHM’s Pacific Northwest chapter and has spent the past few years leading the perioperative issues for the society’s work group.
“We get to a certain point of our career as hospitalists, and if we’re just plugging in and working, doing our shifts, somewhere in that 8- to 10-year range, we might get a little bored, tired, worn out,” Dr. Thompson said. “I believe, if we have the community and professional home to keep us engaged, that helps us see the value in what we’re doing every day. It helps us continue to grow, so we don’t hit that wall.”
Given Dr. Thompson’s involvement both with her chapter and the society’s chapter support committee, she will likely continue that effort to make sure SHM’s board sees the value of encouraging and partnering with local chapters. She will also work with SHM president Ron Greeno, MD, FCCP, MHM, on policy issues, as her background in public health has aligned her interests on health care reform and other headwinds facing the specialty.
“I went in to do my masters in public health with the idea that I wanted to build the skill set so that I could be more analytical in how I approach our problem solving, our discovery in the hospital setting,” she said. “It really speaks to a part of me that has always been interested in finding ways to prevent illness and moving beyond that reactivity that we have in medicine into a prevention-based [approach].”
Dr. Thompson noted that her background in perioperative medicine helps her work as part of a team because it “entirely relies on collaboration and coordination of care, which is pretty much the basis of what we do in the hospital any day.”
Dr. Rehm, who serves as a pediatric hospitalist at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, said she will also bring a teamwork-focused perspective to the SHM board.
She could be expected to view everything through the lens of inpatient pediatrics, but that’s not her style.
“I think we have so many similarities and so many things that [pediatric and adult hospitalists] can partner to do together,” she said. “We all are involved in, for example, medication reconciliation or discharge-management planning or postacute care follow-up. There’s a lot of synergy, and I think we can learn so much from each other.”
Dr. Rehm, who chairs SHM’s Pediatrics Committee and the 2017 Pediatric Hospital Medicine meeting, pointed out that working well with others is a natural skill set for hospitalists.
“Collaboration is probably my biggest skill set and that of many hospital medicine providers,” she said. “I think I do that in my job here at Vanderbilt in thinking about complicated patients that requirement multiple subspecialists and in bringing together people to figure out the question at hand. That is definitely my leadership style.”
If Dr. Rehm has one goal on the board, it is to become a little bit more like Dr. Thompson and focus on chapter development for pediatric hospitalists.
“I’m really interested in engaging with members to better understand the struggles on the front line so that we can make sure that, as an organization, we’re offering a brand of things that our membership needs,” she said. “So, I’m really looking forward to becoming more involved in the chapter engagement and development. The Nashville chapter is getting re-engaged now and I’m excited to be involved.”
To prepare for her debut board meeting in Las Vegas, Dr. Rehm attended SHM board meetings at the group’s Philadelphia headquarters over the past two years.
“I’ve been lucky enough to attend the fall board meeting in Philadelphia and observe the board in action, and I think that has helped me get to know some of the current board members and to have a little bit of a vision of what the meetings will be like,” she said.
SHM’s two newest board members – pediatric hospitalist Kris Rehm, MD, SFHM, and perioperative specialist Rachel Thompson, MD, MPH, SFHM – will bring their expertise to bear on the society’s top panel.
However, neither woman sees her role as shaping the board. In fact, they see themselves as lucky to be joining the team.
“I really want to hear everyone’s voice, and I hope to see how we can all move to better places together,” added Dr. Rehm, associate professor of clinical pediatrics and director of the division of hospital medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Both board members were officially seated for three-year terms at HM17 in Las Vegas. They replace former SHM president Robert Harrington, MD, SFHM, and veteran pediatric hospitalist Erin Stucky Fisher, MD, MHM.
Each of the new board members brings a strong perspective to the panel.
For Dr. Thompson, that viewpoint is based in engagement. She is the former chair of SHM’s Pacific Northwest chapter and has spent the past few years leading the perioperative issues for the society’s work group.
“We get to a certain point of our career as hospitalists, and if we’re just plugging in and working, doing our shifts, somewhere in that 8- to 10-year range, we might get a little bored, tired, worn out,” Dr. Thompson said. “I believe, if we have the community and professional home to keep us engaged, that helps us see the value in what we’re doing every day. It helps us continue to grow, so we don’t hit that wall.”
Given Dr. Thompson’s involvement both with her chapter and the society’s chapter support committee, she will likely continue that effort to make sure SHM’s board sees the value of encouraging and partnering with local chapters. She will also work with SHM president Ron Greeno, MD, FCCP, MHM, on policy issues, as her background in public health has aligned her interests on health care reform and other headwinds facing the specialty.
“I went in to do my masters in public health with the idea that I wanted to build the skill set so that I could be more analytical in how I approach our problem solving, our discovery in the hospital setting,” she said. “It really speaks to a part of me that has always been interested in finding ways to prevent illness and moving beyond that reactivity that we have in medicine into a prevention-based [approach].”
Dr. Thompson noted that her background in perioperative medicine helps her work as part of a team because it “entirely relies on collaboration and coordination of care, which is pretty much the basis of what we do in the hospital any day.”
Dr. Rehm, who serves as a pediatric hospitalist at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, said she will also bring a teamwork-focused perspective to the SHM board.
She could be expected to view everything through the lens of inpatient pediatrics, but that’s not her style.
“I think we have so many similarities and so many things that [pediatric and adult hospitalists] can partner to do together,” she said. “We all are involved in, for example, medication reconciliation or discharge-management planning or postacute care follow-up. There’s a lot of synergy, and I think we can learn so much from each other.”
Dr. Rehm, who chairs SHM’s Pediatrics Committee and the 2017 Pediatric Hospital Medicine meeting, pointed out that working well with others is a natural skill set for hospitalists.
“Collaboration is probably my biggest skill set and that of many hospital medicine providers,” she said. “I think I do that in my job here at Vanderbilt in thinking about complicated patients that requirement multiple subspecialists and in bringing together people to figure out the question at hand. That is definitely my leadership style.”
If Dr. Rehm has one goal on the board, it is to become a little bit more like Dr. Thompson and focus on chapter development for pediatric hospitalists.
“I’m really interested in engaging with members to better understand the struggles on the front line so that we can make sure that, as an organization, we’re offering a brand of things that our membership needs,” she said. “So, I’m really looking forward to becoming more involved in the chapter engagement and development. The Nashville chapter is getting re-engaged now and I’m excited to be involved.”
To prepare for her debut board meeting in Las Vegas, Dr. Rehm attended SHM board meetings at the group’s Philadelphia headquarters over the past two years.
“I’ve been lucky enough to attend the fall board meeting in Philadelphia and observe the board in action, and I think that has helped me get to know some of the current board members and to have a little bit of a vision of what the meetings will be like,” she said.
Grassroots policymaking demands that hospitalists team up
LAS VEGAS – Alla Zilbering, MD, sat at attention for hours during HM17, jotting notes like a scribe about the myriad of federal rules that are pretty rapidly pushing hospitalists and health care as a whole away from fee-for-service payments to a world where doctors are paid for quality.
So, why did she do it? Why all that time on policy, instead of practice?
Because Dr. Zilbering felt compelled to get more involved. As a lead hospitalist at Cigna-HealthSpring, a Medicare Advantage program in Philadelphia, she’s already part of initiatives to improve transitions of care and reduce readmissions.
However, she said she wants to do more. “I’m feeling like, unless you actually address the policy, you can’t get that far in terms of what you can physically do with a patient.”
HM17 was the meeting for her, then. SHM, this year, unveiled its first Health Policy Mini Track, dedicated to updating attendees on the implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement initiative, and a host of other federal programs. Hospitalists were updated on a litany of advocacy efforts, including observation status, interoperability of electronic health records systems, and the recent launch of the first hospitalist billing code.
Two of the meeting’s three keynote speakers were Washington veterans who confirmed that, while nightly news reports may suggest that health care reforms contained in the Affordable Care Act are constantly in flux, the trajectory toward paying for higher quality care at lower costs shows no signs of abating.
Plenary speaker Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, MHM, deputy administrator for innovation and quality at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and director of its Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, noted that the proposed American Health Care Act doesn’t have a “single word dealing with the Innovation Center,” which is the government agency tasked with supporting the development and testing of new payment and service delivery models.
He added that the policy’s gravitation away from fee-for-service toward alternative payment models will ideally lead to better patient outcomes, more coordinated care, and financial savings. So, he urged hospitalists to continue to help design those new payment and care-delivery systems.
M.A. Williams, MD, FHM, the medical director of perioperative services at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, said that the way to help design those systems is to get involved. Policy may seem like an issue for C-suite denizens and wonks, but individual practitioners can make more impact than they think.
“Learn enough to be dangerous and go to your CMO [or] whoever you can get a meeting with because MACRA is going to effect all physicians in the organization, even if the system is not doing anything active about it,” Dr. Williams said. “If you show interest and show that you have a little bit of knowledge, you’d be surprised with what kind of traction you might be able to get.”
And that traction isn’t just within the walls of a given institution, Dr. Greeno said. He wants more hospitalists involved in the society’s overall advocacy efforts. That includes lobbying Congress both in person and with phone calls, letters, and emails and pressuring people at home via conduits like SHM’s Grassroots Network, which has nearly 1,200 members from 490 states.
Don’t think those things work? Dr. Greeno said, one need look no further than the new C6 Medicare billing code for hospitalists that went live in April. That didn’t come to pass without a concentrated effort.
“That was a ton of work by our staff and several years of lobbying,” he said. “We had to be able to explain to them why our data should be treated differently as a specialty and compared only to other hospitalists as opposed to other internists or family practitioners.”
The code will help differentiate hospitalists at a time when MACRA will force changes in how hospitalists are paid. But, it will also define the specialty in a way that has never before been accomplished.
“It is an identity within Medicare,” said Josh Boswell, SHM’s director of government affairs.
While the ACA and the potential repeal of its insurance reforms have taken center stage in the media, Dr. Greeno urged hospitalists to focus more on the implementation and rule-making via MACRA.
The bill, which eliminated the Sustainable Growth Rate formula, states that, starting in 2019, Medicare payments will be provided through one of two pathways. The first is the Merit-based Incentive Payment System that combines the Physician Quality Reporting System, the Physician Value-Based Modifier, and Meaningful Use into a single performance-based payment system.
The second option is Alternative Payment Models, which is meant to incentivize the adoption of payment models that move physicians away from fee-for-service models more quickly. To qualify in this pathway, the criteria require elements of “upside and downside financial risk,” as well as meeting threshold requirements for either patients or payments. Those physicians that meet the criteria qualify for a 5% incentive payment.
The first payments in 2019 are based on performance data for 2017. As most hospitalists won’t quality for APMs in the first year, they will default to the MIPS pathway, Dr. Greeno said.
“This bill will have a greater impact on ... providers than any piece of legislation in our lifetime,” he noted. “Now, the ACA had a bigger impact on consumers, but, in terms of us as providers, MACRA is a sea change.”
The topic is so important, SHM has created a website at www.macraforhm.org that is meant to serve as a tutorial to the law’s basics. The guide is intended to educate hospitalists and to motivate them to get involved in the policy work that affects them all, Dr. Greeno said
“If you don’t know how the system works, you can’t influence it,” he added. “My view of the world is, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
LAS VEGAS – Alla Zilbering, MD, sat at attention for hours during HM17, jotting notes like a scribe about the myriad of federal rules that are pretty rapidly pushing hospitalists and health care as a whole away from fee-for-service payments to a world where doctors are paid for quality.
So, why did she do it? Why all that time on policy, instead of practice?
Because Dr. Zilbering felt compelled to get more involved. As a lead hospitalist at Cigna-HealthSpring, a Medicare Advantage program in Philadelphia, she’s already part of initiatives to improve transitions of care and reduce readmissions.
However, she said she wants to do more. “I’m feeling like, unless you actually address the policy, you can’t get that far in terms of what you can physically do with a patient.”
HM17 was the meeting for her, then. SHM, this year, unveiled its first Health Policy Mini Track, dedicated to updating attendees on the implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement initiative, and a host of other federal programs. Hospitalists were updated on a litany of advocacy efforts, including observation status, interoperability of electronic health records systems, and the recent launch of the first hospitalist billing code.
Two of the meeting’s three keynote speakers were Washington veterans who confirmed that, while nightly news reports may suggest that health care reforms contained in the Affordable Care Act are constantly in flux, the trajectory toward paying for higher quality care at lower costs shows no signs of abating.
Plenary speaker Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, MHM, deputy administrator for innovation and quality at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and director of its Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, noted that the proposed American Health Care Act doesn’t have a “single word dealing with the Innovation Center,” which is the government agency tasked with supporting the development and testing of new payment and service delivery models.
He added that the policy’s gravitation away from fee-for-service toward alternative payment models will ideally lead to better patient outcomes, more coordinated care, and financial savings. So, he urged hospitalists to continue to help design those new payment and care-delivery systems.
M.A. Williams, MD, FHM, the medical director of perioperative services at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, said that the way to help design those systems is to get involved. Policy may seem like an issue for C-suite denizens and wonks, but individual practitioners can make more impact than they think.
“Learn enough to be dangerous and go to your CMO [or] whoever you can get a meeting with because MACRA is going to effect all physicians in the organization, even if the system is not doing anything active about it,” Dr. Williams said. “If you show interest and show that you have a little bit of knowledge, you’d be surprised with what kind of traction you might be able to get.”
And that traction isn’t just within the walls of a given institution, Dr. Greeno said. He wants more hospitalists involved in the society’s overall advocacy efforts. That includes lobbying Congress both in person and with phone calls, letters, and emails and pressuring people at home via conduits like SHM’s Grassroots Network, which has nearly 1,200 members from 490 states.
Don’t think those things work? Dr. Greeno said, one need look no further than the new C6 Medicare billing code for hospitalists that went live in April. That didn’t come to pass without a concentrated effort.
“That was a ton of work by our staff and several years of lobbying,” he said. “We had to be able to explain to them why our data should be treated differently as a specialty and compared only to other hospitalists as opposed to other internists or family practitioners.”
The code will help differentiate hospitalists at a time when MACRA will force changes in how hospitalists are paid. But, it will also define the specialty in a way that has never before been accomplished.
“It is an identity within Medicare,” said Josh Boswell, SHM’s director of government affairs.
While the ACA and the potential repeal of its insurance reforms have taken center stage in the media, Dr. Greeno urged hospitalists to focus more on the implementation and rule-making via MACRA.
The bill, which eliminated the Sustainable Growth Rate formula, states that, starting in 2019, Medicare payments will be provided through one of two pathways. The first is the Merit-based Incentive Payment System that combines the Physician Quality Reporting System, the Physician Value-Based Modifier, and Meaningful Use into a single performance-based payment system.
The second option is Alternative Payment Models, which is meant to incentivize the adoption of payment models that move physicians away from fee-for-service models more quickly. To qualify in this pathway, the criteria require elements of “upside and downside financial risk,” as well as meeting threshold requirements for either patients or payments. Those physicians that meet the criteria qualify for a 5% incentive payment.
The first payments in 2019 are based on performance data for 2017. As most hospitalists won’t quality for APMs in the first year, they will default to the MIPS pathway, Dr. Greeno said.
“This bill will have a greater impact on ... providers than any piece of legislation in our lifetime,” he noted. “Now, the ACA had a bigger impact on consumers, but, in terms of us as providers, MACRA is a sea change.”
The topic is so important, SHM has created a website at www.macraforhm.org that is meant to serve as a tutorial to the law’s basics. The guide is intended to educate hospitalists and to motivate them to get involved in the policy work that affects them all, Dr. Greeno said
“If you don’t know how the system works, you can’t influence it,” he added. “My view of the world is, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
LAS VEGAS – Alla Zilbering, MD, sat at attention for hours during HM17, jotting notes like a scribe about the myriad of federal rules that are pretty rapidly pushing hospitalists and health care as a whole away from fee-for-service payments to a world where doctors are paid for quality.
So, why did she do it? Why all that time on policy, instead of practice?
Because Dr. Zilbering felt compelled to get more involved. As a lead hospitalist at Cigna-HealthSpring, a Medicare Advantage program in Philadelphia, she’s already part of initiatives to improve transitions of care and reduce readmissions.
However, she said she wants to do more. “I’m feeling like, unless you actually address the policy, you can’t get that far in terms of what you can physically do with a patient.”
HM17 was the meeting for her, then. SHM, this year, unveiled its first Health Policy Mini Track, dedicated to updating attendees on the implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement initiative, and a host of other federal programs. Hospitalists were updated on a litany of advocacy efforts, including observation status, interoperability of electronic health records systems, and the recent launch of the first hospitalist billing code.
Two of the meeting’s three keynote speakers were Washington veterans who confirmed that, while nightly news reports may suggest that health care reforms contained in the Affordable Care Act are constantly in flux, the trajectory toward paying for higher quality care at lower costs shows no signs of abating.
Plenary speaker Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, MHM, deputy administrator for innovation and quality at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and director of its Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, noted that the proposed American Health Care Act doesn’t have a “single word dealing with the Innovation Center,” which is the government agency tasked with supporting the development and testing of new payment and service delivery models.
He added that the policy’s gravitation away from fee-for-service toward alternative payment models will ideally lead to better patient outcomes, more coordinated care, and financial savings. So, he urged hospitalists to continue to help design those new payment and care-delivery systems.
M.A. Williams, MD, FHM, the medical director of perioperative services at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, said that the way to help design those systems is to get involved. Policy may seem like an issue for C-suite denizens and wonks, but individual practitioners can make more impact than they think.
“Learn enough to be dangerous and go to your CMO [or] whoever you can get a meeting with because MACRA is going to effect all physicians in the organization, even if the system is not doing anything active about it,” Dr. Williams said. “If you show interest and show that you have a little bit of knowledge, you’d be surprised with what kind of traction you might be able to get.”
And that traction isn’t just within the walls of a given institution, Dr. Greeno said. He wants more hospitalists involved in the society’s overall advocacy efforts. That includes lobbying Congress both in person and with phone calls, letters, and emails and pressuring people at home via conduits like SHM’s Grassroots Network, which has nearly 1,200 members from 490 states.
Don’t think those things work? Dr. Greeno said, one need look no further than the new C6 Medicare billing code for hospitalists that went live in April. That didn’t come to pass without a concentrated effort.
“That was a ton of work by our staff and several years of lobbying,” he said. “We had to be able to explain to them why our data should be treated differently as a specialty and compared only to other hospitalists as opposed to other internists or family practitioners.”
The code will help differentiate hospitalists at a time when MACRA will force changes in how hospitalists are paid. But, it will also define the specialty in a way that has never before been accomplished.
“It is an identity within Medicare,” said Josh Boswell, SHM’s director of government affairs.
While the ACA and the potential repeal of its insurance reforms have taken center stage in the media, Dr. Greeno urged hospitalists to focus more on the implementation and rule-making via MACRA.
The bill, which eliminated the Sustainable Growth Rate formula, states that, starting in 2019, Medicare payments will be provided through one of two pathways. The first is the Merit-based Incentive Payment System that combines the Physician Quality Reporting System, the Physician Value-Based Modifier, and Meaningful Use into a single performance-based payment system.
The second option is Alternative Payment Models, which is meant to incentivize the adoption of payment models that move physicians away from fee-for-service models more quickly. To qualify in this pathway, the criteria require elements of “upside and downside financial risk,” as well as meeting threshold requirements for either patients or payments. Those physicians that meet the criteria qualify for a 5% incentive payment.
The first payments in 2019 are based on performance data for 2017. As most hospitalists won’t quality for APMs in the first year, they will default to the MIPS pathway, Dr. Greeno said.
“This bill will have a greater impact on ... providers than any piece of legislation in our lifetime,” he noted. “Now, the ACA had a bigger impact on consumers, but, in terms of us as providers, MACRA is a sea change.”
The topic is so important, SHM has created a website at www.macraforhm.org that is meant to serve as a tutorial to the law’s basics. The guide is intended to educate hospitalists and to motivate them to get involved in the policy work that affects them all, Dr. Greeno said
“If you don’t know how the system works, you can’t influence it,” he added. “My view of the world is, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Practice management skills more relevant than ever
LAS VEGAS – Babatunde Akinsete, MD, took a new job about 18 months ago as a lead hospitalist within Adventist Health System of Florida. The role has the expected leadership responsibilities, but those folks he’s now partly supervising are the same ones who used to be his peers.
The same people he spent time “in the trenches” with, complaining about the problems they saw – issues that are now partly his job to help fix.
“It’s tough,” Dr. Akinsete said at the annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine. “How do you motivate people?”
Welcome to managing a practice, circa 2017. The day-to-day doings of an HM group – recruiting, retention, compensation, scheduling and more – are the backbone of the specialty. And SHM’s annual meeting makes the topics a principal point, from a dedicated precourse to dozens of presentations to networking opportunities introducing experienced leaders to nascent ones.
The subject is more relevant than ever these days as the maturing specialty now has three generations of hospitalists practicing side by side, including those who founded the society and laid the groundwork for the specialty some 20 years ago and those who will now infuse it with new blood for the next 20 years, said Jerome Siy, MD, SFHM, an HM17 faculty member and chair of SHM’s Practice Management Committee.
“We’re heading into a cycle of a lot of change,” he said. “Being able to manage change is going to be pretty key.”
The first step in building or bettering a “healthy practice” is building a “culture of ownership,” Dr. Siy said.
“You must have the right culture first if you’re going to tackle any of these issues, whether it’s things like schedules to finances to negotiations,” he added. “Second is this openness and innovation to think outside the box and to allow yourself to hear things that might not work for you. Be open to it because whether you hear something that doesn’t work or not, it may inspire you to figure out … what is the key element you were missing before.”
That’s what Liza Rodriguez Jimenez, MD, is taking away from the meeting. She is moving into a codirector position for her medical group at St. Luke’s in Boise, Idaho. A crash course in alternative-payment models, full-time equivalents (FTEs), relative value units (RVUs) and scheduling was an eye-opener for her.
But to Dr. Siy’s point, it wasn’t the specific examples of how other people do what they do that intrigued Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez. It was more so that people just did it differently.
“It’s just helpful to know that there are other choices,” Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez said. “In other words, why do we do 7 on, 7 off? I don’t know. We just do. If you don’t know that you don’t know, then how do you know to change it? You get exposed to so much stuff here now that you can theoretically go back and say, ‘why do we do 7 on, 7 off? … And then let the group say we want 5 on, 10 off, 4 on, 3 off. Whatever people decide.”
Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, chief quality officer of the department of medicine at UCLA Health in Los Angeles, said that idea of just framing the question differently is a big deal, and a leadership skill in and of itself. For example, say a hospital medicine group’s leaders are trying to discuss whether the practice should continue its comanagement focus.
“If you frame a decision as, ‘We are going to lose this comanagement,’ there’s just something, like a gut feeling, you don’t want to lose stuff,” she said. “As opposed to, if you say, ‘Gosh, think about the gains. That we will have all this free time that we now have where we can develop other aspects of our hospital medicine group.’ So when you frame the same exact thing in terms of loss, it becomes so much more difficult for us to actually let go of that.”
Leadership is more than just framing, of course. Dr. Afsar and former SHM president Eric Howell, MD, MHM, said that leadership traits include using standardized processes to make decisions, as well as getting group members involved in those decisions when necessary and using feedback and motivation properly.
But, at day’s end, practice management is managing the needs of your practice.
For Abdul-Hady Kheder, MD, of Hamilton Hospitalists LLC in Central New Jersey, the meeting opened his eyes to techniques he could use to deal with lower reimbursement figures and less patients.
“What can help my situation will be increasing the volume of the practice,” he said. “Right now, we admit 30%-40% of the patients admitted into the hospital. National average is 60%-90% of total hospital admissions. I think that most probably will balance my financial dilemma.”
For Rodney Hollis, practice administrator for Eskenazi Health of Indianapolis, the meeting was a way to glean tips on improving his practice. One nugget he’s excited about: pairing an experienced hospitalist with a new hire for a year. As a nonclinical administrator, Hollis said he views his role as helping clinicians work on the things they are best at, while he handle the rest.
“The more clinical time that the clinical directors can spend, that’s more advantageous to the group,” Hollis said. “Allowing the nonclinical activities to be done by an administrator helps. We want more responsibility and if there’s something that our clinical is doing that I can do, why not have me do it?”
For Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez, open-ended questions like that one are among the most “insightful” takeaways from the meeting.
“There is no right or wrong way, so maybe we’ve been doing it this way ‘just because,’ ” she said. “Now we need to look at it and say, ‘Can we do it a different way? Can we adapt it? Can we change it?’”
She’s starting to sound like a practice manager already.
LAS VEGAS – Babatunde Akinsete, MD, took a new job about 18 months ago as a lead hospitalist within Adventist Health System of Florida. The role has the expected leadership responsibilities, but those folks he’s now partly supervising are the same ones who used to be his peers.
The same people he spent time “in the trenches” with, complaining about the problems they saw – issues that are now partly his job to help fix.
“It’s tough,” Dr. Akinsete said at the annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine. “How do you motivate people?”
Welcome to managing a practice, circa 2017. The day-to-day doings of an HM group – recruiting, retention, compensation, scheduling and more – are the backbone of the specialty. And SHM’s annual meeting makes the topics a principal point, from a dedicated precourse to dozens of presentations to networking opportunities introducing experienced leaders to nascent ones.
The subject is more relevant than ever these days as the maturing specialty now has three generations of hospitalists practicing side by side, including those who founded the society and laid the groundwork for the specialty some 20 years ago and those who will now infuse it with new blood for the next 20 years, said Jerome Siy, MD, SFHM, an HM17 faculty member and chair of SHM’s Practice Management Committee.
“We’re heading into a cycle of a lot of change,” he said. “Being able to manage change is going to be pretty key.”
The first step in building or bettering a “healthy practice” is building a “culture of ownership,” Dr. Siy said.
“You must have the right culture first if you’re going to tackle any of these issues, whether it’s things like schedules to finances to negotiations,” he added. “Second is this openness and innovation to think outside the box and to allow yourself to hear things that might not work for you. Be open to it because whether you hear something that doesn’t work or not, it may inspire you to figure out … what is the key element you were missing before.”
That’s what Liza Rodriguez Jimenez, MD, is taking away from the meeting. She is moving into a codirector position for her medical group at St. Luke’s in Boise, Idaho. A crash course in alternative-payment models, full-time equivalents (FTEs), relative value units (RVUs) and scheduling was an eye-opener for her.
But to Dr. Siy’s point, it wasn’t the specific examples of how other people do what they do that intrigued Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez. It was more so that people just did it differently.
“It’s just helpful to know that there are other choices,” Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez said. “In other words, why do we do 7 on, 7 off? I don’t know. We just do. If you don’t know that you don’t know, then how do you know to change it? You get exposed to so much stuff here now that you can theoretically go back and say, ‘why do we do 7 on, 7 off? … And then let the group say we want 5 on, 10 off, 4 on, 3 off. Whatever people decide.”
Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, chief quality officer of the department of medicine at UCLA Health in Los Angeles, said that idea of just framing the question differently is a big deal, and a leadership skill in and of itself. For example, say a hospital medicine group’s leaders are trying to discuss whether the practice should continue its comanagement focus.
“If you frame a decision as, ‘We are going to lose this comanagement,’ there’s just something, like a gut feeling, you don’t want to lose stuff,” she said. “As opposed to, if you say, ‘Gosh, think about the gains. That we will have all this free time that we now have where we can develop other aspects of our hospital medicine group.’ So when you frame the same exact thing in terms of loss, it becomes so much more difficult for us to actually let go of that.”
Leadership is more than just framing, of course. Dr. Afsar and former SHM president Eric Howell, MD, MHM, said that leadership traits include using standardized processes to make decisions, as well as getting group members involved in those decisions when necessary and using feedback and motivation properly.
But, at day’s end, practice management is managing the needs of your practice.
For Abdul-Hady Kheder, MD, of Hamilton Hospitalists LLC in Central New Jersey, the meeting opened his eyes to techniques he could use to deal with lower reimbursement figures and less patients.
“What can help my situation will be increasing the volume of the practice,” he said. “Right now, we admit 30%-40% of the patients admitted into the hospital. National average is 60%-90% of total hospital admissions. I think that most probably will balance my financial dilemma.”
For Rodney Hollis, practice administrator for Eskenazi Health of Indianapolis, the meeting was a way to glean tips on improving his practice. One nugget he’s excited about: pairing an experienced hospitalist with a new hire for a year. As a nonclinical administrator, Hollis said he views his role as helping clinicians work on the things they are best at, while he handle the rest.
“The more clinical time that the clinical directors can spend, that’s more advantageous to the group,” Hollis said. “Allowing the nonclinical activities to be done by an administrator helps. We want more responsibility and if there’s something that our clinical is doing that I can do, why not have me do it?”
For Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez, open-ended questions like that one are among the most “insightful” takeaways from the meeting.
“There is no right or wrong way, so maybe we’ve been doing it this way ‘just because,’ ” she said. “Now we need to look at it and say, ‘Can we do it a different way? Can we adapt it? Can we change it?’”
She’s starting to sound like a practice manager already.
LAS VEGAS – Babatunde Akinsete, MD, took a new job about 18 months ago as a lead hospitalist within Adventist Health System of Florida. The role has the expected leadership responsibilities, but those folks he’s now partly supervising are the same ones who used to be his peers.
The same people he spent time “in the trenches” with, complaining about the problems they saw – issues that are now partly his job to help fix.
“It’s tough,” Dr. Akinsete said at the annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine. “How do you motivate people?”
Welcome to managing a practice, circa 2017. The day-to-day doings of an HM group – recruiting, retention, compensation, scheduling and more – are the backbone of the specialty. And SHM’s annual meeting makes the topics a principal point, from a dedicated precourse to dozens of presentations to networking opportunities introducing experienced leaders to nascent ones.
The subject is more relevant than ever these days as the maturing specialty now has three generations of hospitalists practicing side by side, including those who founded the society and laid the groundwork for the specialty some 20 years ago and those who will now infuse it with new blood for the next 20 years, said Jerome Siy, MD, SFHM, an HM17 faculty member and chair of SHM’s Practice Management Committee.
“We’re heading into a cycle of a lot of change,” he said. “Being able to manage change is going to be pretty key.”
The first step in building or bettering a “healthy practice” is building a “culture of ownership,” Dr. Siy said.
“You must have the right culture first if you’re going to tackle any of these issues, whether it’s things like schedules to finances to negotiations,” he added. “Second is this openness and innovation to think outside the box and to allow yourself to hear things that might not work for you. Be open to it because whether you hear something that doesn’t work or not, it may inspire you to figure out … what is the key element you were missing before.”
That’s what Liza Rodriguez Jimenez, MD, is taking away from the meeting. She is moving into a codirector position for her medical group at St. Luke’s in Boise, Idaho. A crash course in alternative-payment models, full-time equivalents (FTEs), relative value units (RVUs) and scheduling was an eye-opener for her.
But to Dr. Siy’s point, it wasn’t the specific examples of how other people do what they do that intrigued Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez. It was more so that people just did it differently.
“It’s just helpful to know that there are other choices,” Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez said. “In other words, why do we do 7 on, 7 off? I don’t know. We just do. If you don’t know that you don’t know, then how do you know to change it? You get exposed to so much stuff here now that you can theoretically go back and say, ‘why do we do 7 on, 7 off? … And then let the group say we want 5 on, 10 off, 4 on, 3 off. Whatever people decide.”
Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, chief quality officer of the department of medicine at UCLA Health in Los Angeles, said that idea of just framing the question differently is a big deal, and a leadership skill in and of itself. For example, say a hospital medicine group’s leaders are trying to discuss whether the practice should continue its comanagement focus.
“If you frame a decision as, ‘We are going to lose this comanagement,’ there’s just something, like a gut feeling, you don’t want to lose stuff,” she said. “As opposed to, if you say, ‘Gosh, think about the gains. That we will have all this free time that we now have where we can develop other aspects of our hospital medicine group.’ So when you frame the same exact thing in terms of loss, it becomes so much more difficult for us to actually let go of that.”
Leadership is more than just framing, of course. Dr. Afsar and former SHM president Eric Howell, MD, MHM, said that leadership traits include using standardized processes to make decisions, as well as getting group members involved in those decisions when necessary and using feedback and motivation properly.
But, at day’s end, practice management is managing the needs of your practice.
For Abdul-Hady Kheder, MD, of Hamilton Hospitalists LLC in Central New Jersey, the meeting opened his eyes to techniques he could use to deal with lower reimbursement figures and less patients.
“What can help my situation will be increasing the volume of the practice,” he said. “Right now, we admit 30%-40% of the patients admitted into the hospital. National average is 60%-90% of total hospital admissions. I think that most probably will balance my financial dilemma.”
For Rodney Hollis, practice administrator for Eskenazi Health of Indianapolis, the meeting was a way to glean tips on improving his practice. One nugget he’s excited about: pairing an experienced hospitalist with a new hire for a year. As a nonclinical administrator, Hollis said he views his role as helping clinicians work on the things they are best at, while he handle the rest.
“The more clinical time that the clinical directors can spend, that’s more advantageous to the group,” Hollis said. “Allowing the nonclinical activities to be done by an administrator helps. We want more responsibility and if there’s something that our clinical is doing that I can do, why not have me do it?”
For Dr. Rodriguez Jimenez, open-ended questions like that one are among the most “insightful” takeaways from the meeting.
“There is no right or wrong way, so maybe we’ve been doing it this way ‘just because,’ ” she said. “Now we need to look at it and say, ‘Can we do it a different way? Can we adapt it? Can we change it?’”
She’s starting to sound like a practice manager already.
HM17 plenaries: Hospital medicine leading health care shift to value, quality
LAS VEGAS – The path to improved health care in the U.S. may never be straight – and it certainly won’t be easy – but the three plenary speakers at HM17 think its destination is pretty clear: a system that increasingly rewards quality care delivered at lower costs.
And the three experts agreed that there may be “no finer group” than hospitalists to continue leading the charge.
Hospitalists “have been at the center of change, not only in building a new field and showing us that medicine doesn’t have to be the way it always was,” said Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, former acting assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “You have been at the forefront of seeing that we’re getting better value out of our health care system.”
Dr. DeSalvo believes HM’s scope of practice must evolve to include a focus on social determinants – such as economic stability, neighborhood and physical environment, education, and access to healthy options for food – because they have “direct relationships with mortality and morbidity and cost.”
In other words, Dr. DeSalvo wondered aloud, what good is treating a grandmother’s heart failure over and over if she’s always going to return to the hospital because her home, her neighborhood, or her finances mean she is unable to prevent recurring issues?
“If you listen to the hoof-beats that are coming, there is definitely a financial imprimatur to do this,” Dr. DeSalvo said. “There is going to be an expectation from public and private payers... that we are going to be taking into account and addressing social factors. Just look at the data from the people of this country – they are shouting loudly to you that they need help.”
“I can tell you our system still does not have a highly reliable, whole health system for those children and their families,” he said. “Every weekend, I have a family that I can’t discharge because they don’t have the social and home-based supports for them to go home. So they literally sit in the hospital until Monday. That makes no sense for our overall health system.”
Dr. Conway assured attendees that health system transformation is a bipartisan ideal and that for all the tumult in Washington, the progress of testing new payment- and service-delivery models will move forward.
The work “on value, the work on accountability, the work on bundled payments... will continue and will continue to be important to you and the patients you serve,” he said.
Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, concluded the meeting – as is tradition – by telling hospitalists the field remains positioned to take the lead for hospital transformation. And technology, despite its myriad frustrations, is still the tool that will get the field there.
“Digital is really important here, because it becomes an enabler for those stakeholders who care about what we do to measure what we do, and our ability to change what we do in a far more robust way than we could ever do before, if we get our acts together,” Dr. Wachter said. “We’re well past the time where you can nibble around the edges here, you can get this done with little mini projects. You really have to remake your whole delivery system, the way you do your work in order to succeed in this environment.”
Dr. Wachter agreed that social determinants must be addressed. He said HM might do better to partner with folks handling those issues, rather than tackling them head on. Instead, HM needs to be “focusing on the right things” amid mounting pressures from digitization, consolidation of everything from health systems to insurance companies to HM companies, and the gravitation toward population health.
“We have successfully positioned ourselves as the people who are leaders in this work,” Dr. Wachter said, “and it is increasingly important that we continue to do that as we go forward.”
LAS VEGAS – The path to improved health care in the U.S. may never be straight – and it certainly won’t be easy – but the three plenary speakers at HM17 think its destination is pretty clear: a system that increasingly rewards quality care delivered at lower costs.
And the three experts agreed that there may be “no finer group” than hospitalists to continue leading the charge.
Hospitalists “have been at the center of change, not only in building a new field and showing us that medicine doesn’t have to be the way it always was,” said Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, former acting assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “You have been at the forefront of seeing that we’re getting better value out of our health care system.”
Dr. DeSalvo believes HM’s scope of practice must evolve to include a focus on social determinants – such as economic stability, neighborhood and physical environment, education, and access to healthy options for food – because they have “direct relationships with mortality and morbidity and cost.”
In other words, Dr. DeSalvo wondered aloud, what good is treating a grandmother’s heart failure over and over if she’s always going to return to the hospital because her home, her neighborhood, or her finances mean she is unable to prevent recurring issues?
“If you listen to the hoof-beats that are coming, there is definitely a financial imprimatur to do this,” Dr. DeSalvo said. “There is going to be an expectation from public and private payers... that we are going to be taking into account and addressing social factors. Just look at the data from the people of this country – they are shouting loudly to you that they need help.”
“I can tell you our system still does not have a highly reliable, whole health system for those children and their families,” he said. “Every weekend, I have a family that I can’t discharge because they don’t have the social and home-based supports for them to go home. So they literally sit in the hospital until Monday. That makes no sense for our overall health system.”
Dr. Conway assured attendees that health system transformation is a bipartisan ideal and that for all the tumult in Washington, the progress of testing new payment- and service-delivery models will move forward.
The work “on value, the work on accountability, the work on bundled payments... will continue and will continue to be important to you and the patients you serve,” he said.
Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, concluded the meeting – as is tradition – by telling hospitalists the field remains positioned to take the lead for hospital transformation. And technology, despite its myriad frustrations, is still the tool that will get the field there.
“Digital is really important here, because it becomes an enabler for those stakeholders who care about what we do to measure what we do, and our ability to change what we do in a far more robust way than we could ever do before, if we get our acts together,” Dr. Wachter said. “We’re well past the time where you can nibble around the edges here, you can get this done with little mini projects. You really have to remake your whole delivery system, the way you do your work in order to succeed in this environment.”
Dr. Wachter agreed that social determinants must be addressed. He said HM might do better to partner with folks handling those issues, rather than tackling them head on. Instead, HM needs to be “focusing on the right things” amid mounting pressures from digitization, consolidation of everything from health systems to insurance companies to HM companies, and the gravitation toward population health.
“We have successfully positioned ourselves as the people who are leaders in this work,” Dr. Wachter said, “and it is increasingly important that we continue to do that as we go forward.”
LAS VEGAS – The path to improved health care in the U.S. may never be straight – and it certainly won’t be easy – but the three plenary speakers at HM17 think its destination is pretty clear: a system that increasingly rewards quality care delivered at lower costs.
And the three experts agreed that there may be “no finer group” than hospitalists to continue leading the charge.
Hospitalists “have been at the center of change, not only in building a new field and showing us that medicine doesn’t have to be the way it always was,” said Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, former acting assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “You have been at the forefront of seeing that we’re getting better value out of our health care system.”
Dr. DeSalvo believes HM’s scope of practice must evolve to include a focus on social determinants – such as economic stability, neighborhood and physical environment, education, and access to healthy options for food – because they have “direct relationships with mortality and morbidity and cost.”
In other words, Dr. DeSalvo wondered aloud, what good is treating a grandmother’s heart failure over and over if she’s always going to return to the hospital because her home, her neighborhood, or her finances mean she is unable to prevent recurring issues?
“If you listen to the hoof-beats that are coming, there is definitely a financial imprimatur to do this,” Dr. DeSalvo said. “There is going to be an expectation from public and private payers... that we are going to be taking into account and addressing social factors. Just look at the data from the people of this country – they are shouting loudly to you that they need help.”
“I can tell you our system still does not have a highly reliable, whole health system for those children and their families,” he said. “Every weekend, I have a family that I can’t discharge because they don’t have the social and home-based supports for them to go home. So they literally sit in the hospital until Monday. That makes no sense for our overall health system.”
Dr. Conway assured attendees that health system transformation is a bipartisan ideal and that for all the tumult in Washington, the progress of testing new payment- and service-delivery models will move forward.
The work “on value, the work on accountability, the work on bundled payments... will continue and will continue to be important to you and the patients you serve,” he said.
Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, concluded the meeting – as is tradition – by telling hospitalists the field remains positioned to take the lead for hospital transformation. And technology, despite its myriad frustrations, is still the tool that will get the field there.
“Digital is really important here, because it becomes an enabler for those stakeholders who care about what we do to measure what we do, and our ability to change what we do in a far more robust way than we could ever do before, if we get our acts together,” Dr. Wachter said. “We’re well past the time where you can nibble around the edges here, you can get this done with little mini projects. You really have to remake your whole delivery system, the way you do your work in order to succeed in this environment.”
Dr. Wachter agreed that social determinants must be addressed. He said HM might do better to partner with folks handling those issues, rather than tackling them head on. Instead, HM needs to be “focusing on the right things” amid mounting pressures from digitization, consolidation of everything from health systems to insurance companies to HM companies, and the gravitation toward population health.
“We have successfully positioned ourselves as the people who are leaders in this work,” Dr. Wachter said, “and it is increasingly important that we continue to do that as we go forward.”
RIV spotlights HM-focused research in real-time
LAS VEGAS – Masih Shinwa, MD, stood beside a half-circle of judges at SHM’s annual Research, Innovations, and Clinical Vignettes poster competition and argued why his entry, already a finalist, should win.
To think, his work, “Please ‘THINK’ Before You Order: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Decreasing Overutilization of Daily Labs,” was borne simply of a group of medical students who incredulously said that they were amazed patients would be woken up in the night for tests.
Dr. Shinwa’s project shows just how an idea can blossom into a recognized poster.
Some 18 months ago, the students he works with at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York just couldn’t understand why so many tests had to be done overnight while a patient slept. So, Dr. Shinwa and his colleagues looked at ways to reduce unnecessary lab tests and chemistry testing.
Now, Dr. Shinwa was humbled to think his work and that of his colleagues could be a pathway to eliminating tests that don’t need to happen across the country, a focal point of SHM and the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s Choosing Wisely Campaign.
“This is a way to make it national,” he said. “You may have affected the lives of the patients in your hospital, but, unless you attend these types of national meetings, it’s hard to get that perspective across (the country).”
That level of personal and professional collaboration is the purpose of the RIV, said Margaret Fang, MD, MPH, FHM, program chair for the HM17 competition.
“One of the amazing things is, everyone has their own poster. They’re doing their work,” she added. “But then they start up conversations with the people next to them. ... Seeing the organic networking and discussion that arise from that is really exciting. RIV serves as a way of connecting people who might not have know the other person was doing that kind of work.”
Dr. Fang said that the intergenerational aspect of the RIV, where early-career hospitalists mingle with the field’s founders and leaders, creates an environment where research is encouraged.
“Just seeing the intense interest that more senior hospitalists have in mentoring and guiding the next generation is delightful,” she added.
Dr. Shinwa said that the specialty’s focus on both clinical research and systems-level change is important, as the work positions the field to be leaders not just in patient care but for hospitals as a whole.
“We are physicians,” he said. “Our role is taking care of patients. Knowing that there are people who are not just focusing on taking care of specific patients but are actually there to improve the entire system and the process – that’s really gratifying.”
That’s the word that Merideth Prevost, MD, of New Mexico VA Health Care System, Albuquerque also used to describe presenting her poster, “Improving Accuracy in Measuring Fluid Balance on a General Medicine Ward.”
“If we can improve our little microcosm, then spread it to other folks, then patients all over the country can be helped by what we do,” she said. “And that’s a really cool thought.”
The RIV also has the unique advantage of letting people have immediate and direct access to lead researchers at the exact moment of reading their research. HM17 attendees had conversations that usually went beyond just the results, which can be downloaded at www.shmabstracts.com.
Dr. Prevost believes that the chats can helpfully highlight the behind-the-scenes pitfalls and mistakes of research that can sometimes be just as valuable as the published results.
“The things that don’t make it to the posters are all the challenges that people experienced on the way to get to this particular work,” she added. “Like ‘Oh, well, I’ve tried this before, and it didn’t work at all.’ Or, ‘Oh yeah we tried this and it didn’t work at all, but we tried this other thing that worked really great.’ Or, ‘This was the key to our success.’ You can brainstorm with every poster that you’re interested in, which is really exciting.”
LAS VEGAS – Masih Shinwa, MD, stood beside a half-circle of judges at SHM’s annual Research, Innovations, and Clinical Vignettes poster competition and argued why his entry, already a finalist, should win.
To think, his work, “Please ‘THINK’ Before You Order: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Decreasing Overutilization of Daily Labs,” was borne simply of a group of medical students who incredulously said that they were amazed patients would be woken up in the night for tests.
Dr. Shinwa’s project shows just how an idea can blossom into a recognized poster.
Some 18 months ago, the students he works with at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York just couldn’t understand why so many tests had to be done overnight while a patient slept. So, Dr. Shinwa and his colleagues looked at ways to reduce unnecessary lab tests and chemistry testing.
Now, Dr. Shinwa was humbled to think his work and that of his colleagues could be a pathway to eliminating tests that don’t need to happen across the country, a focal point of SHM and the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s Choosing Wisely Campaign.
“This is a way to make it national,” he said. “You may have affected the lives of the patients in your hospital, but, unless you attend these types of national meetings, it’s hard to get that perspective across (the country).”
That level of personal and professional collaboration is the purpose of the RIV, said Margaret Fang, MD, MPH, FHM, program chair for the HM17 competition.
“One of the amazing things is, everyone has their own poster. They’re doing their work,” she added. “But then they start up conversations with the people next to them. ... Seeing the organic networking and discussion that arise from that is really exciting. RIV serves as a way of connecting people who might not have know the other person was doing that kind of work.”
Dr. Fang said that the intergenerational aspect of the RIV, where early-career hospitalists mingle with the field’s founders and leaders, creates an environment where research is encouraged.
“Just seeing the intense interest that more senior hospitalists have in mentoring and guiding the next generation is delightful,” she added.
Dr. Shinwa said that the specialty’s focus on both clinical research and systems-level change is important, as the work positions the field to be leaders not just in patient care but for hospitals as a whole.
“We are physicians,” he said. “Our role is taking care of patients. Knowing that there are people who are not just focusing on taking care of specific patients but are actually there to improve the entire system and the process – that’s really gratifying.”
That’s the word that Merideth Prevost, MD, of New Mexico VA Health Care System, Albuquerque also used to describe presenting her poster, “Improving Accuracy in Measuring Fluid Balance on a General Medicine Ward.”
“If we can improve our little microcosm, then spread it to other folks, then patients all over the country can be helped by what we do,” she said. “And that’s a really cool thought.”
The RIV also has the unique advantage of letting people have immediate and direct access to lead researchers at the exact moment of reading their research. HM17 attendees had conversations that usually went beyond just the results, which can be downloaded at www.shmabstracts.com.
Dr. Prevost believes that the chats can helpfully highlight the behind-the-scenes pitfalls and mistakes of research that can sometimes be just as valuable as the published results.
“The things that don’t make it to the posters are all the challenges that people experienced on the way to get to this particular work,” she added. “Like ‘Oh, well, I’ve tried this before, and it didn’t work at all.’ Or, ‘Oh yeah we tried this and it didn’t work at all, but we tried this other thing that worked really great.’ Or, ‘This was the key to our success.’ You can brainstorm with every poster that you’re interested in, which is really exciting.”
LAS VEGAS – Masih Shinwa, MD, stood beside a half-circle of judges at SHM’s annual Research, Innovations, and Clinical Vignettes poster competition and argued why his entry, already a finalist, should win.
To think, his work, “Please ‘THINK’ Before You Order: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Decreasing Overutilization of Daily Labs,” was borne simply of a group of medical students who incredulously said that they were amazed patients would be woken up in the night for tests.
Dr. Shinwa’s project shows just how an idea can blossom into a recognized poster.
Some 18 months ago, the students he works with at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York just couldn’t understand why so many tests had to be done overnight while a patient slept. So, Dr. Shinwa and his colleagues looked at ways to reduce unnecessary lab tests and chemistry testing.
Now, Dr. Shinwa was humbled to think his work and that of his colleagues could be a pathway to eliminating tests that don’t need to happen across the country, a focal point of SHM and the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s Choosing Wisely Campaign.
“This is a way to make it national,” he said. “You may have affected the lives of the patients in your hospital, but, unless you attend these types of national meetings, it’s hard to get that perspective across (the country).”
That level of personal and professional collaboration is the purpose of the RIV, said Margaret Fang, MD, MPH, FHM, program chair for the HM17 competition.
“One of the amazing things is, everyone has their own poster. They’re doing their work,” she added. “But then they start up conversations with the people next to them. ... Seeing the organic networking and discussion that arise from that is really exciting. RIV serves as a way of connecting people who might not have know the other person was doing that kind of work.”
Dr. Fang said that the intergenerational aspect of the RIV, where early-career hospitalists mingle with the field’s founders and leaders, creates an environment where research is encouraged.
“Just seeing the intense interest that more senior hospitalists have in mentoring and guiding the next generation is delightful,” she added.
Dr. Shinwa said that the specialty’s focus on both clinical research and systems-level change is important, as the work positions the field to be leaders not just in patient care but for hospitals as a whole.
“We are physicians,” he said. “Our role is taking care of patients. Knowing that there are people who are not just focusing on taking care of specific patients but are actually there to improve the entire system and the process – that’s really gratifying.”
That’s the word that Merideth Prevost, MD, of New Mexico VA Health Care System, Albuquerque also used to describe presenting her poster, “Improving Accuracy in Measuring Fluid Balance on a General Medicine Ward.”
“If we can improve our little microcosm, then spread it to other folks, then patients all over the country can be helped by what we do,” she said. “And that’s a really cool thought.”
The RIV also has the unique advantage of letting people have immediate and direct access to lead researchers at the exact moment of reading their research. HM17 attendees had conversations that usually went beyond just the results, which can be downloaded at www.shmabstracts.com.
Dr. Prevost believes that the chats can helpfully highlight the behind-the-scenes pitfalls and mistakes of research that can sometimes be just as valuable as the published results.
“The things that don’t make it to the posters are all the challenges that people experienced on the way to get to this particular work,” she added. “Like ‘Oh, well, I’ve tried this before, and it didn’t work at all.’ Or, ‘Oh yeah we tried this and it didn’t work at all, but we tried this other thing that worked really great.’ Or, ‘This was the key to our success.’ You can brainstorm with every poster that you’re interested in, which is really exciting.”
Hospitalists share strategies to secure, excel at jobs
LAS VEGAS – In the view of academic hospitalist Alfred Burger, MD, SFHM, portability was long a dirty word in HM circles. But not anymore.
“My good friends in law and business do this all the time,” said Dr. Burger, associate program director of the internal medicine residency program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York. “You’re not going to make partner in city X, but they’ve got an opening to be partner in city Y if you go there and perform for a year. People up and leave coasts, people up and leave states, people have up and left the country. ... Doctors are starting to view it the same way.”
The lessons of career development were a focal point of HM17, particularly for younger physicians who could take advantage of the Early-Career Hospitalists mini-track. But Dr. Burger said that those strategies of upward mobility can apply whether someone is chasing their first job or their fifth.
First, identify one’s strengths and play to those. Then identify the skills you don’t have or don’t excel at, and address those deficiencies.
“How can you acquire the skills to put yourself in the best position to move up, if you wish to develop your career as a leader?” Dr. Burger said. “If you wish to be the best clinician, you still need to stay on top of the game. Things like coming to SHM, staying on top of the content. That’s important.”
Another skill set is self-advocacy.
“Be your own champion,” said Brian Markoff, MD, SFHM, chief of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s in New York. “Many of us are very good at this and many of us are terrible at this. You may fall somewhere in between, but you do have to be your own champion.”
Dr. Burger said that he understands that there is a fine line between too much self-promotion and too little. But he urged hospitalists at all career points to take responsibility for marketing themselves.
“Nobody is going to invest in your career unless you yourself invest in it,” he added. “You have to put it as a priority, and not in a selfish way, but in a way [that,] if you wish to move forward and move up, you’ve got to put the time in. It’s not a natural assumption anymore that, if you are the best and brightest of a group of doctors, you will just be chosen to lead.”
In a similar vein, networking is a major boon to career development that can be a double-edged scalpel.
“Having a great ‘social game’ is important, but if all you bring to the table is a social game, you’ll find yourself out of a job just as quickly as you found that job,” Dr. Burger said. “Meaning, you might be able to get it based on that, but you’re not going to be able to sustain it. At the same time, being highly accomplished and having no social graces is also a killer. So, you need to be sort of strong in both areas.”
Many of the meeting’s opportunities for tips on professional development are personal, but HM group leaders have to consider developing the careers of their employees. One of the main planks of that is physician engagement, said Flora Kisuule, MD, MPH, SFHM, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
“I don’t believe your institution or your organization can go anywhere if your employees are not engaged or if the people you work with are not engaged,” she said, adding that disengaged employees “are actively working against you. You don’t want that. You can’t go in any direction when there are people rowing in the opposite direction. At best, you stay in one place. At worst, you can end up losing ground.”
Hospitalist Christie Masters, MD, MBA, MHA, who practices at UCLA, disclosed during a session that she also runs a wellness coaching firm. She added that a focus on personal wellness and well-being is its own form of career development. It works in tandem with engagement, morale, and professional growth.
“If you’re only focusing on wellness and you don’t have hospitalists or a group that’s engaged or with high morale, they’re going to burnout or they’re going to leave,” Dr. Masters said. “And nobody wants that for their group. So, if we surround ourselves with people who feel well and feel whole, that’s going to have intangible benefits ... that affect the bottom line.”
LAS VEGAS – In the view of academic hospitalist Alfred Burger, MD, SFHM, portability was long a dirty word in HM circles. But not anymore.
“My good friends in law and business do this all the time,” said Dr. Burger, associate program director of the internal medicine residency program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York. “You’re not going to make partner in city X, but they’ve got an opening to be partner in city Y if you go there and perform for a year. People up and leave coasts, people up and leave states, people have up and left the country. ... Doctors are starting to view it the same way.”
The lessons of career development were a focal point of HM17, particularly for younger physicians who could take advantage of the Early-Career Hospitalists mini-track. But Dr. Burger said that those strategies of upward mobility can apply whether someone is chasing their first job or their fifth.
First, identify one’s strengths and play to those. Then identify the skills you don’t have or don’t excel at, and address those deficiencies.
“How can you acquire the skills to put yourself in the best position to move up, if you wish to develop your career as a leader?” Dr. Burger said. “If you wish to be the best clinician, you still need to stay on top of the game. Things like coming to SHM, staying on top of the content. That’s important.”
Another skill set is self-advocacy.
“Be your own champion,” said Brian Markoff, MD, SFHM, chief of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s in New York. “Many of us are very good at this and many of us are terrible at this. You may fall somewhere in between, but you do have to be your own champion.”
Dr. Burger said that he understands that there is a fine line between too much self-promotion and too little. But he urged hospitalists at all career points to take responsibility for marketing themselves.
“Nobody is going to invest in your career unless you yourself invest in it,” he added. “You have to put it as a priority, and not in a selfish way, but in a way [that,] if you wish to move forward and move up, you’ve got to put the time in. It’s not a natural assumption anymore that, if you are the best and brightest of a group of doctors, you will just be chosen to lead.”
In a similar vein, networking is a major boon to career development that can be a double-edged scalpel.
“Having a great ‘social game’ is important, but if all you bring to the table is a social game, you’ll find yourself out of a job just as quickly as you found that job,” Dr. Burger said. “Meaning, you might be able to get it based on that, but you’re not going to be able to sustain it. At the same time, being highly accomplished and having no social graces is also a killer. So, you need to be sort of strong in both areas.”
Many of the meeting’s opportunities for tips on professional development are personal, but HM group leaders have to consider developing the careers of their employees. One of the main planks of that is physician engagement, said Flora Kisuule, MD, MPH, SFHM, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
“I don’t believe your institution or your organization can go anywhere if your employees are not engaged or if the people you work with are not engaged,” she said, adding that disengaged employees “are actively working against you. You don’t want that. You can’t go in any direction when there are people rowing in the opposite direction. At best, you stay in one place. At worst, you can end up losing ground.”
Hospitalist Christie Masters, MD, MBA, MHA, who practices at UCLA, disclosed during a session that she also runs a wellness coaching firm. She added that a focus on personal wellness and well-being is its own form of career development. It works in tandem with engagement, morale, and professional growth.
“If you’re only focusing on wellness and you don’t have hospitalists or a group that’s engaged or with high morale, they’re going to burnout or they’re going to leave,” Dr. Masters said. “And nobody wants that for their group. So, if we surround ourselves with people who feel well and feel whole, that’s going to have intangible benefits ... that affect the bottom line.”
LAS VEGAS – In the view of academic hospitalist Alfred Burger, MD, SFHM, portability was long a dirty word in HM circles. But not anymore.
“My good friends in law and business do this all the time,” said Dr. Burger, associate program director of the internal medicine residency program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York. “You’re not going to make partner in city X, but they’ve got an opening to be partner in city Y if you go there and perform for a year. People up and leave coasts, people up and leave states, people have up and left the country. ... Doctors are starting to view it the same way.”
The lessons of career development were a focal point of HM17, particularly for younger physicians who could take advantage of the Early-Career Hospitalists mini-track. But Dr. Burger said that those strategies of upward mobility can apply whether someone is chasing their first job or their fifth.
First, identify one’s strengths and play to those. Then identify the skills you don’t have or don’t excel at, and address those deficiencies.
“How can you acquire the skills to put yourself in the best position to move up, if you wish to develop your career as a leader?” Dr. Burger said. “If you wish to be the best clinician, you still need to stay on top of the game. Things like coming to SHM, staying on top of the content. That’s important.”
Another skill set is self-advocacy.
“Be your own champion,” said Brian Markoff, MD, SFHM, chief of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s in New York. “Many of us are very good at this and many of us are terrible at this. You may fall somewhere in between, but you do have to be your own champion.”
Dr. Burger said that he understands that there is a fine line between too much self-promotion and too little. But he urged hospitalists at all career points to take responsibility for marketing themselves.
“Nobody is going to invest in your career unless you yourself invest in it,” he added. “You have to put it as a priority, and not in a selfish way, but in a way [that,] if you wish to move forward and move up, you’ve got to put the time in. It’s not a natural assumption anymore that, if you are the best and brightest of a group of doctors, you will just be chosen to lead.”
In a similar vein, networking is a major boon to career development that can be a double-edged scalpel.
“Having a great ‘social game’ is important, but if all you bring to the table is a social game, you’ll find yourself out of a job just as quickly as you found that job,” Dr. Burger said. “Meaning, you might be able to get it based on that, but you’re not going to be able to sustain it. At the same time, being highly accomplished and having no social graces is also a killer. So, you need to be sort of strong in both areas.”
Many of the meeting’s opportunities for tips on professional development are personal, but HM group leaders have to consider developing the careers of their employees. One of the main planks of that is physician engagement, said Flora Kisuule, MD, MPH, SFHM, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
“I don’t believe your institution or your organization can go anywhere if your employees are not engaged or if the people you work with are not engaged,” she said, adding that disengaged employees “are actively working against you. You don’t want that. You can’t go in any direction when there are people rowing in the opposite direction. At best, you stay in one place. At worst, you can end up losing ground.”
Hospitalist Christie Masters, MD, MBA, MHA, who practices at UCLA, disclosed during a session that she also runs a wellness coaching firm. She added that a focus on personal wellness and well-being is its own form of career development. It works in tandem with engagement, morale, and professional growth.
“If you’re only focusing on wellness and you don’t have hospitalists or a group that’s engaged or with high morale, they’re going to burnout or they’re going to leave,” Dr. Masters said. “And nobody wants that for their group. So, if we surround ourselves with people who feel well and feel whole, that’s going to have intangible benefits ... that affect the bottom line.”
Hospitalists’ EMR frustrations continue: SHM report
LAS VEGAS – Ronald Schaefer, MD, a hospitalist with Hawaii Pacific Health who also works on creating digital templates for his hospital, can’t input hemoglobin A1c levels from three different labs into his electronic medical records (EMR) system the same way.
Hospitalist George Dimitriou, MD, FHM, who splits his time at Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh between clinical work and medical informatics, worries there are so many fields in his EMR that physicians can get distracted.
Yevgeniy “Eugene” Gitelman, MD, a clinical informatics manager at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania Health in Philadelphia, wonders how good any systems can be with the privacy concerns related to HIPAA.
This was the nexus of IT and HM17, a time when hospitalists said they are stymied and frustrated by continuing issues of interoperability, functionality, and access. The meeting highlighted new smartphone and tablet applications, as well as medical devices available to hospitalists, but tech-focused physicians say the biggest issue remains the day-to-day workings of EMR.
“If you build something really good, people will use it. If you build something that makes their documentation process a lot easier and a lot faster and a lot better, they’ll use it,” said Dr. Schaefer. “The tools aren’t there yet. I don’t think the technology is mature enough.”
If the tech hasn’t yet come of full age, the concerns surely have. SHM unveiled a white paper at HM17 that codified hospitalists’ worries about the current state of IT. The report, “Hospitalist Perspectives on Electronic Medical Records,” found that “a staggering” 85% of providers said they spend more time interacting with their inpatient EMR than their actual inpatients.
Rupesh Prasad, MD, MPH, SFHM, chair of SHM’s Health IT Committee, says the report is meant to foster discussion about the issues surrounding EMRs. The data points, generated from 462 respondents, are stark. Just 40% said they were happy with their EMR. Some 52% would change vendors if they could. One-quarter of respondents would revert to using paper if given the option.
“By sharing these results, we hope to raise awareness of the unacceptable performance of existing systems,” the report states. “This continues to contribute to our slower than desired improvement in quality and safety, as well as increasing provider frustration. We strongly believe that we need a renewed focus on initial goals of technology adoption in health care.”
Dr. Prasad said that he hopes hospitalists heed that call to action and use the report in discussions with various stakeholders, including vendors, public policy officials, and their own bosses.
“We want to give hospitalists ammunition to go back to their systems and talk to their administrators to see if they can influence [it],” he said.
Dr. Prasad is pleased that the society is sensitive to the issues surrounding technology. He encourages hospitalists to actively participate in HMX, SHM’s online portal to discuss health IT issues and crowd-source potential solutions. Patrick Vulgamore, MPH, SHM’s director of governance and practice management, said the society is formulating a potential special-interest working group to further seek to solve problems.
Hospitalists were also urged to apply for American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) certification in clinical informatics. Physicians can grandfather into eligibility via the “practice pathway” through the end of the year, if they’ve been working in informatics professionally for at least 25% of their time during any three of the previous five years. Next year, only graduates of two-year Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education–accredited fellowships will be board eligible.
“As end users of technology, we understand the problems better than anybody else,” Dr. Prasad said. “Obviously, the next step would be try to solve the problems. And what better way then to get involved and become experts in what you do?”
While much of the meeting’s tech talk was frustration, both former National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, and HM Dean Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, forecast a future when artificial intelligence and intuitive computers work alongside physicians. Imagine the user-friendliness of Apple’s Siri or Google’s Alexa married to the existing functionalities provided by firms such as Epic or Cerner.
But that’s years away, and hospitalists like Dr. Dimitriou want help now.
“The speed of medicine, the speed of what’s happening in real time, is still faster than what our electronic tools seem to be able to keep up with,” he said. “There are encouraging signs that we’ve definitely moved in the right direction. We’ve come a long way ... but again, the speed at which things are moving? We aren’t keeping up. We’ve got to do more.”
LAS VEGAS – Ronald Schaefer, MD, a hospitalist with Hawaii Pacific Health who also works on creating digital templates for his hospital, can’t input hemoglobin A1c levels from three different labs into his electronic medical records (EMR) system the same way.
Hospitalist George Dimitriou, MD, FHM, who splits his time at Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh between clinical work and medical informatics, worries there are so many fields in his EMR that physicians can get distracted.
Yevgeniy “Eugene” Gitelman, MD, a clinical informatics manager at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania Health in Philadelphia, wonders how good any systems can be with the privacy concerns related to HIPAA.
This was the nexus of IT and HM17, a time when hospitalists said they are stymied and frustrated by continuing issues of interoperability, functionality, and access. The meeting highlighted new smartphone and tablet applications, as well as medical devices available to hospitalists, but tech-focused physicians say the biggest issue remains the day-to-day workings of EMR.
“If you build something really good, people will use it. If you build something that makes their documentation process a lot easier and a lot faster and a lot better, they’ll use it,” said Dr. Schaefer. “The tools aren’t there yet. I don’t think the technology is mature enough.”
If the tech hasn’t yet come of full age, the concerns surely have. SHM unveiled a white paper at HM17 that codified hospitalists’ worries about the current state of IT. The report, “Hospitalist Perspectives on Electronic Medical Records,” found that “a staggering” 85% of providers said they spend more time interacting with their inpatient EMR than their actual inpatients.
Rupesh Prasad, MD, MPH, SFHM, chair of SHM’s Health IT Committee, says the report is meant to foster discussion about the issues surrounding EMRs. The data points, generated from 462 respondents, are stark. Just 40% said they were happy with their EMR. Some 52% would change vendors if they could. One-quarter of respondents would revert to using paper if given the option.
“By sharing these results, we hope to raise awareness of the unacceptable performance of existing systems,” the report states. “This continues to contribute to our slower than desired improvement in quality and safety, as well as increasing provider frustration. We strongly believe that we need a renewed focus on initial goals of technology adoption in health care.”
Dr. Prasad said that he hopes hospitalists heed that call to action and use the report in discussions with various stakeholders, including vendors, public policy officials, and their own bosses.
“We want to give hospitalists ammunition to go back to their systems and talk to their administrators to see if they can influence [it],” he said.
Dr. Prasad is pleased that the society is sensitive to the issues surrounding technology. He encourages hospitalists to actively participate in HMX, SHM’s online portal to discuss health IT issues and crowd-source potential solutions. Patrick Vulgamore, MPH, SHM’s director of governance and practice management, said the society is formulating a potential special-interest working group to further seek to solve problems.
Hospitalists were also urged to apply for American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) certification in clinical informatics. Physicians can grandfather into eligibility via the “practice pathway” through the end of the year, if they’ve been working in informatics professionally for at least 25% of their time during any three of the previous five years. Next year, only graduates of two-year Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education–accredited fellowships will be board eligible.
“As end users of technology, we understand the problems better than anybody else,” Dr. Prasad said. “Obviously, the next step would be try to solve the problems. And what better way then to get involved and become experts in what you do?”
While much of the meeting’s tech talk was frustration, both former National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, and HM Dean Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, forecast a future when artificial intelligence and intuitive computers work alongside physicians. Imagine the user-friendliness of Apple’s Siri or Google’s Alexa married to the existing functionalities provided by firms such as Epic or Cerner.
But that’s years away, and hospitalists like Dr. Dimitriou want help now.
“The speed of medicine, the speed of what’s happening in real time, is still faster than what our electronic tools seem to be able to keep up with,” he said. “There are encouraging signs that we’ve definitely moved in the right direction. We’ve come a long way ... but again, the speed at which things are moving? We aren’t keeping up. We’ve got to do more.”
LAS VEGAS – Ronald Schaefer, MD, a hospitalist with Hawaii Pacific Health who also works on creating digital templates for his hospital, can’t input hemoglobin A1c levels from three different labs into his electronic medical records (EMR) system the same way.
Hospitalist George Dimitriou, MD, FHM, who splits his time at Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh between clinical work and medical informatics, worries there are so many fields in his EMR that physicians can get distracted.
Yevgeniy “Eugene” Gitelman, MD, a clinical informatics manager at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania Health in Philadelphia, wonders how good any systems can be with the privacy concerns related to HIPAA.
This was the nexus of IT and HM17, a time when hospitalists said they are stymied and frustrated by continuing issues of interoperability, functionality, and access. The meeting highlighted new smartphone and tablet applications, as well as medical devices available to hospitalists, but tech-focused physicians say the biggest issue remains the day-to-day workings of EMR.
“If you build something really good, people will use it. If you build something that makes their documentation process a lot easier and a lot faster and a lot better, they’ll use it,” said Dr. Schaefer. “The tools aren’t there yet. I don’t think the technology is mature enough.”
If the tech hasn’t yet come of full age, the concerns surely have. SHM unveiled a white paper at HM17 that codified hospitalists’ worries about the current state of IT. The report, “Hospitalist Perspectives on Electronic Medical Records,” found that “a staggering” 85% of providers said they spend more time interacting with their inpatient EMR than their actual inpatients.
Rupesh Prasad, MD, MPH, SFHM, chair of SHM’s Health IT Committee, says the report is meant to foster discussion about the issues surrounding EMRs. The data points, generated from 462 respondents, are stark. Just 40% said they were happy with their EMR. Some 52% would change vendors if they could. One-quarter of respondents would revert to using paper if given the option.
“By sharing these results, we hope to raise awareness of the unacceptable performance of existing systems,” the report states. “This continues to contribute to our slower than desired improvement in quality and safety, as well as increasing provider frustration. We strongly believe that we need a renewed focus on initial goals of technology adoption in health care.”
Dr. Prasad said that he hopes hospitalists heed that call to action and use the report in discussions with various stakeholders, including vendors, public policy officials, and their own bosses.
“We want to give hospitalists ammunition to go back to their systems and talk to their administrators to see if they can influence [it],” he said.
Dr. Prasad is pleased that the society is sensitive to the issues surrounding technology. He encourages hospitalists to actively participate in HMX, SHM’s online portal to discuss health IT issues and crowd-source potential solutions. Patrick Vulgamore, MPH, SHM’s director of governance and practice management, said the society is formulating a potential special-interest working group to further seek to solve problems.
Hospitalists were also urged to apply for American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) certification in clinical informatics. Physicians can grandfather into eligibility via the “practice pathway” through the end of the year, if they’ve been working in informatics professionally for at least 25% of their time during any three of the previous five years. Next year, only graduates of two-year Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education–accredited fellowships will be board eligible.
“As end users of technology, we understand the problems better than anybody else,” Dr. Prasad said. “Obviously, the next step would be try to solve the problems. And what better way then to get involved and become experts in what you do?”
While much of the meeting’s tech talk was frustration, both former National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, and HM Dean Robert Wachter, MD, MHM, forecast a future when artificial intelligence and intuitive computers work alongside physicians. Imagine the user-friendliness of Apple’s Siri or Google’s Alexa married to the existing functionalities provided by firms such as Epic or Cerner.
But that’s years away, and hospitalists like Dr. Dimitriou want help now.
“The speed of medicine, the speed of what’s happening in real time, is still faster than what our electronic tools seem to be able to keep up with,” he said. “There are encouraging signs that we’ve definitely moved in the right direction. We’ve come a long way ... but again, the speed at which things are moving? We aren’t keeping up. We’ve got to do more.”
Highlights of Day 4
Sometimes the final day of a convention is nothing more than the “getaway day.”
But not at HM17. Not this year.
The finale of the 2017 annual meeting is capped off, as has become tradition, by a speech from the dean of hospital medicine: Robert Wachter, MD, MHM. The last time Dr. Wachter gave his address from a Vegas stage, it ended with him in head-to-toe Elton John regalia. While there’s no guarantee of a wardrobe reprisal, the annual address from the man who helped name the specialty promises to entertain and inform, said HM17 course director Lenny Feldman, MD, SFHM.
However, Dr. Wachter’s words – this year titled “Planning for the Future in a World of Constant Change: What Should Hospitalists Do?” – aren’t the final day’s only lure.
Two of this year’s newest educational tracks – Health Policy and Medical Education – debut today and offer five courses focusing on niche areas interesting to many hospitalists. Also today is the annual Potpurri track, which highlights off-beat topics such as “Case-Based Approach to Difficult Conversations” and “The History of Medicine: Discoveries that Shaped Our Profession.”
“These sessions are unique but have a wide range of appeal,” Dr. Feldman said. “Attendees are going to have a great time delving into these topics.”
Sometimes the final day of a convention is nothing more than the “getaway day.”
But not at HM17. Not this year.
The finale of the 2017 annual meeting is capped off, as has become tradition, by a speech from the dean of hospital medicine: Robert Wachter, MD, MHM. The last time Dr. Wachter gave his address from a Vegas stage, it ended with him in head-to-toe Elton John regalia. While there’s no guarantee of a wardrobe reprisal, the annual address from the man who helped name the specialty promises to entertain and inform, said HM17 course director Lenny Feldman, MD, SFHM.
However, Dr. Wachter’s words – this year titled “Planning for the Future in a World of Constant Change: What Should Hospitalists Do?” – aren’t the final day’s only lure.
Two of this year’s newest educational tracks – Health Policy and Medical Education – debut today and offer five courses focusing on niche areas interesting to many hospitalists. Also today is the annual Potpurri track, which highlights off-beat topics such as “Case-Based Approach to Difficult Conversations” and “The History of Medicine: Discoveries that Shaped Our Profession.”
“These sessions are unique but have a wide range of appeal,” Dr. Feldman said. “Attendees are going to have a great time delving into these topics.”
Sometimes the final day of a convention is nothing more than the “getaway day.”
But not at HM17. Not this year.
The finale of the 2017 annual meeting is capped off, as has become tradition, by a speech from the dean of hospital medicine: Robert Wachter, MD, MHM. The last time Dr. Wachter gave his address from a Vegas stage, it ended with him in head-to-toe Elton John regalia. While there’s no guarantee of a wardrobe reprisal, the annual address from the man who helped name the specialty promises to entertain and inform, said HM17 course director Lenny Feldman, MD, SFHM.
However, Dr. Wachter’s words – this year titled “Planning for the Future in a World of Constant Change: What Should Hospitalists Do?” – aren’t the final day’s only lure.
Two of this year’s newest educational tracks – Health Policy and Medical Education – debut today and offer five courses focusing on niche areas interesting to many hospitalists. Also today is the annual Potpurri track, which highlights off-beat topics such as “Case-Based Approach to Difficult Conversations” and “The History of Medicine: Discoveries that Shaped Our Profession.”
“These sessions are unique but have a wide range of appeal,” Dr. Feldman said. “Attendees are going to have a great time delving into these topics.”
Hope and change
Robert M. Wachter, MD, MHM, has given the last plenary address at every SHM annual meeting since 2007. The talks are peppered with his one-of-a-kind take on the confluence of medicine, politics, and policy. Then there was the time when he broke into an Elton John parody.
Where does that point of view come from? Well, as the dean of hospital medicine says in his ever-popular Twitter bio, he is “what happens when a poli-sci major becomes an academic physician.”
That’s a needed perspective this year, as the level of political upheaval in the United States has added to the tumult in the health care field. Questions surrounding the implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and the continued struggles that doctors face when using electronic health records (EHRs) are among the topics that he will address in his this final discussion.
“While [President Donald] Trump brings massive uncertainly, the shift to value and the increasing importance of building a strong culture, a method to continuously improve, and a way to use the EHR to make things better is unlikely to go away,” said Dr. Wachter, whose address is titled, “Mergers, MACRA, and Mission-Creep: Can Hospitalists Thrive in the New World of Healthcare?”
Dr. Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said that the Trump administration is a once-in-a-lifetime anomaly that understandably has made both physicians and patients nervous – particularly at a time when health care reform appeared to be stabilizing.
The new president “adds an amazing wild card, at every level,” he said. “If it weren’t for his administration, I think we’d be on a fairly stable, predictable path. Not that that path doesn’t include a ton of change, but at least it had a predictable path.”
The defeat of Republicans’ plan to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with the American Health Care Act (AHCA) showed that the divide over health care extends even to intraparty discussions.
“The implosion of the AHCA shows how difficult health reform is and how quickly the ACA became the de facto standard,” Dr. Wachter said. “It is now that status quo that is so difficult to change.”
Dr. Wachter, who famously helped coined the term “hospitalist” in the 1996 New England Journal of Medicine paper that propelled the nascent specialty, said that one big challenge to HM is determining the future of how hospitals get paid – and how they pay their workers (335[7]:514-7).
“The business model for hospitals will be massively challenged, and it could get worse if a lot of your patients lose insurance or [if] their payments go way down,” he predicted.
What that means for the daily schedules of hospitalists remains to be seen, but Dr. Wachter doesn’t expect much in the short term.
“The job will be the same,” he said. “Take care of patients well, make them happy, satisfy your bosses and colleagues, and do it for less money. The biggest shift is likely to be that more and more people/systems – doing the same thing – will find that they don’t need as many hospital days, which means that we’ll have fewer patients and fewer hospitals. But we knew that.”
Dr. Wachter is more interested to see what will happen in postacute and other nonhospital facilities, how quickly technology continues to disrupt, and who hospitalists will work for (be it staffing companies, medical groups, or “something new”).
The veteran physician in him says not to get too distracted “by all of the zigs and zags,” he noted, while the political idealist in him says not to ever forget that the “core values and imperatives remain.”
If the past decade of wise words ending SHM’s annual meeting are any indication, Dr. Wachter’s message of trepidation and concern will end on a high note for attendees.
Robert M. Wachter, MD, MHM, has given the last plenary address at every SHM annual meeting since 2007. The talks are peppered with his one-of-a-kind take on the confluence of medicine, politics, and policy. Then there was the time when he broke into an Elton John parody.
Where does that point of view come from? Well, as the dean of hospital medicine says in his ever-popular Twitter bio, he is “what happens when a poli-sci major becomes an academic physician.”
That’s a needed perspective this year, as the level of political upheaval in the United States has added to the tumult in the health care field. Questions surrounding the implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and the continued struggles that doctors face when using electronic health records (EHRs) are among the topics that he will address in his this final discussion.
“While [President Donald] Trump brings massive uncertainly, the shift to value and the increasing importance of building a strong culture, a method to continuously improve, and a way to use the EHR to make things better is unlikely to go away,” said Dr. Wachter, whose address is titled, “Mergers, MACRA, and Mission-Creep: Can Hospitalists Thrive in the New World of Healthcare?”
Dr. Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said that the Trump administration is a once-in-a-lifetime anomaly that understandably has made both physicians and patients nervous – particularly at a time when health care reform appeared to be stabilizing.
The new president “adds an amazing wild card, at every level,” he said. “If it weren’t for his administration, I think we’d be on a fairly stable, predictable path. Not that that path doesn’t include a ton of change, but at least it had a predictable path.”
The defeat of Republicans’ plan to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with the American Health Care Act (AHCA) showed that the divide over health care extends even to intraparty discussions.
“The implosion of the AHCA shows how difficult health reform is and how quickly the ACA became the de facto standard,” Dr. Wachter said. “It is now that status quo that is so difficult to change.”
Dr. Wachter, who famously helped coined the term “hospitalist” in the 1996 New England Journal of Medicine paper that propelled the nascent specialty, said that one big challenge to HM is determining the future of how hospitals get paid – and how they pay their workers (335[7]:514-7).
“The business model for hospitals will be massively challenged, and it could get worse if a lot of your patients lose insurance or [if] their payments go way down,” he predicted.
What that means for the daily schedules of hospitalists remains to be seen, but Dr. Wachter doesn’t expect much in the short term.
“The job will be the same,” he said. “Take care of patients well, make them happy, satisfy your bosses and colleagues, and do it for less money. The biggest shift is likely to be that more and more people/systems – doing the same thing – will find that they don’t need as many hospital days, which means that we’ll have fewer patients and fewer hospitals. But we knew that.”
Dr. Wachter is more interested to see what will happen in postacute and other nonhospital facilities, how quickly technology continues to disrupt, and who hospitalists will work for (be it staffing companies, medical groups, or “something new”).
The veteran physician in him says not to get too distracted “by all of the zigs and zags,” he noted, while the political idealist in him says not to ever forget that the “core values and imperatives remain.”
If the past decade of wise words ending SHM’s annual meeting are any indication, Dr. Wachter’s message of trepidation and concern will end on a high note for attendees.
Robert M. Wachter, MD, MHM, has given the last plenary address at every SHM annual meeting since 2007. The talks are peppered with his one-of-a-kind take on the confluence of medicine, politics, and policy. Then there was the time when he broke into an Elton John parody.
Where does that point of view come from? Well, as the dean of hospital medicine says in his ever-popular Twitter bio, he is “what happens when a poli-sci major becomes an academic physician.”
That’s a needed perspective this year, as the level of political upheaval in the United States has added to the tumult in the health care field. Questions surrounding the implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and the continued struggles that doctors face when using electronic health records (EHRs) are among the topics that he will address in his this final discussion.
“While [President Donald] Trump brings massive uncertainly, the shift to value and the increasing importance of building a strong culture, a method to continuously improve, and a way to use the EHR to make things better is unlikely to go away,” said Dr. Wachter, whose address is titled, “Mergers, MACRA, and Mission-Creep: Can Hospitalists Thrive in the New World of Healthcare?”
Dr. Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said that the Trump administration is a once-in-a-lifetime anomaly that understandably has made both physicians and patients nervous – particularly at a time when health care reform appeared to be stabilizing.
The new president “adds an amazing wild card, at every level,” he said. “If it weren’t for his administration, I think we’d be on a fairly stable, predictable path. Not that that path doesn’t include a ton of change, but at least it had a predictable path.”
The defeat of Republicans’ plan to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with the American Health Care Act (AHCA) showed that the divide over health care extends even to intraparty discussions.
“The implosion of the AHCA shows how difficult health reform is and how quickly the ACA became the de facto standard,” Dr. Wachter said. “It is now that status quo that is so difficult to change.”
Dr. Wachter, who famously helped coined the term “hospitalist” in the 1996 New England Journal of Medicine paper that propelled the nascent specialty, said that one big challenge to HM is determining the future of how hospitals get paid – and how they pay their workers (335[7]:514-7).
“The business model for hospitals will be massively challenged, and it could get worse if a lot of your patients lose insurance or [if] their payments go way down,” he predicted.
What that means for the daily schedules of hospitalists remains to be seen, but Dr. Wachter doesn’t expect much in the short term.
“The job will be the same,” he said. “Take care of patients well, make them happy, satisfy your bosses and colleagues, and do it for less money. The biggest shift is likely to be that more and more people/systems – doing the same thing – will find that they don’t need as many hospital days, which means that we’ll have fewer patients and fewer hospitals. But we knew that.”
Dr. Wachter is more interested to see what will happen in postacute and other nonhospital facilities, how quickly technology continues to disrupt, and who hospitalists will work for (be it staffing companies, medical groups, or “something new”).
The veteran physician in him says not to get too distracted “by all of the zigs and zags,” he noted, while the political idealist in him says not to ever forget that the “core values and imperatives remain.”
If the past decade of wise words ending SHM’s annual meeting are any indication, Dr. Wachter’s message of trepidation and concern will end on a high note for attendees.
Conway says health care payment, quality reform to continue
Keynote speaker Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, MHM, told hospitalists at HM17 Wednesday that, while there is a seemingly endless stream of punditry about the fate of the Affordable Care Act, health care will continue its trajectory to higher value, lower costs, and improved quality for patients.
“Health system transformation, innovation, delivery system reform, accountability, the work that you all do each and every day ... is a bipartisan ideal,” he said. The work “on value, the work on accountability, the work on bundled payments ... will continue and will continue to be important to you and the patients you serve.”
He also echoed Tuesday’s keynote address from Karen DeSalvo, MD, former Acting Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, that hospital medicine needs to look at health care more holistically to help work on social issues. Dr. Conway, who still moonlights as a pediatric academic hospitalist on weekends, knows the problem first-hand as he often sees children on Medicaid who have multiple chronic conditions.
“I can tell you our system still does not have a highly reliable, whole health system for those children and their families,” he said. “Every weekend, I have a family that I can’t discharge because they don’t have the social and home-based supports for them to go home. So, they literally sit in the hospital until Monday. That makes no sense for our overall health system.”
Dr. Conway said that the gravitation away from fee-for-service toward alternative payment models would ideally lead to better patient outcomes, more coordinated care, and financial savings. He urged hospitalists to continue to help design new payment and care-delivery systems.
“You know what you’re passionate about and where you want to drive better care,” he said. “If the army of people in this room and all the places you are working [at] are the driver of better quality, better safety, coordinated care for patients ... that’s what it’s all about.”
Keynote speaker Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, MHM, told hospitalists at HM17 Wednesday that, while there is a seemingly endless stream of punditry about the fate of the Affordable Care Act, health care will continue its trajectory to higher value, lower costs, and improved quality for patients.
“Health system transformation, innovation, delivery system reform, accountability, the work that you all do each and every day ... is a bipartisan ideal,” he said. The work “on value, the work on accountability, the work on bundled payments ... will continue and will continue to be important to you and the patients you serve.”
He also echoed Tuesday’s keynote address from Karen DeSalvo, MD, former Acting Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, that hospital medicine needs to look at health care more holistically to help work on social issues. Dr. Conway, who still moonlights as a pediatric academic hospitalist on weekends, knows the problem first-hand as he often sees children on Medicaid who have multiple chronic conditions.
“I can tell you our system still does not have a highly reliable, whole health system for those children and their families,” he said. “Every weekend, I have a family that I can’t discharge because they don’t have the social and home-based supports for them to go home. So, they literally sit in the hospital until Monday. That makes no sense for our overall health system.”
Dr. Conway said that the gravitation away from fee-for-service toward alternative payment models would ideally lead to better patient outcomes, more coordinated care, and financial savings. He urged hospitalists to continue to help design new payment and care-delivery systems.
“You know what you’re passionate about and where you want to drive better care,” he said. “If the army of people in this room and all the places you are working [at] are the driver of better quality, better safety, coordinated care for patients ... that’s what it’s all about.”
Keynote speaker Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, MHM, told hospitalists at HM17 Wednesday that, while there is a seemingly endless stream of punditry about the fate of the Affordable Care Act, health care will continue its trajectory to higher value, lower costs, and improved quality for patients.
“Health system transformation, innovation, delivery system reform, accountability, the work that you all do each and every day ... is a bipartisan ideal,” he said. The work “on value, the work on accountability, the work on bundled payments ... will continue and will continue to be important to you and the patients you serve.”
He also echoed Tuesday’s keynote address from Karen DeSalvo, MD, former Acting Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, that hospital medicine needs to look at health care more holistically to help work on social issues. Dr. Conway, who still moonlights as a pediatric academic hospitalist on weekends, knows the problem first-hand as he often sees children on Medicaid who have multiple chronic conditions.
“I can tell you our system still does not have a highly reliable, whole health system for those children and their families,” he said. “Every weekend, I have a family that I can’t discharge because they don’t have the social and home-based supports for them to go home. So, they literally sit in the hospital until Monday. That makes no sense for our overall health system.”
Dr. Conway said that the gravitation away from fee-for-service toward alternative payment models would ideally lead to better patient outcomes, more coordinated care, and financial savings. He urged hospitalists to continue to help design new payment and care-delivery systems.
“You know what you’re passionate about and where you want to drive better care,” he said. “If the army of people in this room and all the places you are working [at] are the driver of better quality, better safety, coordinated care for patients ... that’s what it’s all about.”