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Hospitals track dozens of ED metrics. Length of stay. Left-without-being-seen rates. Door-to-triage. Door-to-disposition. Boarding hours. The spreadsheet gets long and the dashboards get busy. Most patients never think about any of it. What they notice is simpler: how long before someone in a white coat looks them in the eye and takes their situation seriously.…

Most hospitalist programs size their staffing against one number: average daily census. Administration has been trained to manage “midnight census”, it is the easiest metric to defend in a budget conversation, the easiest to benchmark against peer hospitals, and the easiest to adjust when the finance team pushes back. It is also, by itself, a…

Hospital executives face mounting pressure to demonstrate measurable returns on every operational investment. When evaluating a hospital medicine program, the conversation often begins and ends with physician compensation. However, the true value of a high-performing hospitalist program extends far beyond direct costs. Hospital executives should think more broadly about how the hospitalist program can drive…

Going beyond the bed number and a billable encounter by Gavin Warner, M.D. In the fast-paced environment of Hospitalist Medicine, it’s easy to fall into the habit of seeing “the patient” as a diagnosis, a bed number, a chart to be updated, a billable encounter. But behind every patient is a person: someone with fears,…

Dr. Emanual A. Friedman, writing in Physician Executive more than twenty years ago, called the delicate balance that healthcare providers must achieve between cost, access and quality the “eternal triangle.” He argued that the variation among these concerns is that each, in turn, receives the most attention from policymakers, payers and the public over time.…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted most aspects of hospital care, and thus disrupted most aspects of the practice of hospital medicine. Now as things begin to swing towards the “new normal”, hospitalist teams are taking a deep breath and looking again at outcomes beyond those of their COVID-19 responses. As Warren Buffet pointed out “you only…

Hiring and retaining staff has become the number one challenge for rural hospitals and healthcare facilities in 2022. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, 13% of U.S. hospitals are experiencing critical staff shortages, with 22% reporting anticipated shortages within the next 7 days. What brought this on? Where did all the doctors go? “The Great Resignation”…