Public Policy Contributor Ron Angus writes…

And so it begins.  It appears that over the next sixty days the much heralded heath care legislation will finally be molded into a form that can be held up for final inspection before being placed into President Obama’s kiln for the final firing.  If past is prologue, then innumerable stakeholders will have only nanoseconds to inspect the finalized handiwork before it is ensconced into our healthcare delivery system. (more…)

Troy Ahlstrom writes…

Integrity – the foundation for credible leadership.

We, as Hospitalists and leaders in our groups, have the opportunity to make things better, or worse, for those around us.  I’ve seen both.  So have you.  To make things better, we’ve got to know who we are, what we seek to bring about, and how to carry out our plans to fruition.  Today, I’m going to focus on the question of “who we are” and what that embodies. (more…)

Rob Chang writes…

Most of my colleagues on this leadership blog have been involved with leadership on the national level, whether via the Society of Hospital Medicine or through leadership of a multi-state hospitalist organization.  I have not.  I am a local hospitalist leader in an academic center, dealing with the daily mundane tasks of our group’s administration (I do make schedules with my secretary), the future concerns and opportunities for our group (what’s the next big thing we are facing), and contributing to our group’s identity as an academic success (publishing on the things that we do every day as hospitalists). (more…)

Public Policy Contributor Eric Siegal, MD, FHM (Chair of SHM’s Public Policy Committee) writes…

About a year ago, I spoke to a statewide assembly of nursing home medical directors who were unanimously concerned that hospitals, discharging increasingly sick patients to their nursing homes, were pushing the limits of what they could safely handle.  From their perspective, shortening acute lengths of stay meant that the burden and cost of caring for seriously ill patients was being transferred from well-resourced hospitals to under-resourced nursing homes.  Needless to say, they didn’t see this as a positive step for patient outcomes.

Cost shifting is one of many predictable negative consequences of a healthcare reimbursement system that rewards provincialism and discourages global accountability. Even hospitalists, arguably the most system-oriented physicians in healthcare, are not immune. (more…)

Rob Bessler wrote…

I had the honor representing both Sound and the Society of Hospital Medicine on a visit to the White House last Thursday to meet with the Policy Director for the Obama Administration on Health Reform in the Office of Public Engagement, Kavita Patel. We then met the Chief Medical Officer for the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Patrick Conway. Dr. Conway will have the responsibility under the Secretary to help deploy $850 billion dollars in the proposed bills.  We expressed our support for driving improvements to quality at a lower cost. Our agenda and time was (more…)