A quick post on something we do not think about often.

We look at the world through our own professional lens.  If you toil at a big urban hospital, your sphere of interest encompasses GME, training, research, and safety net care.  Conversely, if you work at a small, rural hospital, you concentrate on ER and ward coverage, adequacy of services, and connectivity to neighboring facilities and unavailable technology.

Remember this?  Ezra Klein does, and so do I:

We have additional 2011 hospitalist salary data out for consideration.  The title of the linked piece, “Has hospitalist pay finally peaked?,” asks the right question.  Today’s Hospitalist culled the data from 1000 hospitalists from various regions and venues.

A new site and hospital grading system went up yesterday, developed by The Leapfrog Group.  It combines both HHS and Leapfrog metrics to produce a letter grade, and was vetted by objective national quality experts (which does not make it ideal of course).  Your hospital is almost certainly in the database.  Take a look here.

I do hospitals, not meat loaf or fried chicken.  Stick with me.  Lots of great tables and charts to follow.

My last post spoke of the cost shift hospitals invoke when their reimbursement fails to cover expenses.  The thinking goes, Medicare pays $800 for a bed day, and it cost $1000, so charge commercial plans $1200 to balance the ledger.

Today is a grab bag of newsworthy citations:

…something to keep in mind.

This is not aspirational material.

OK, not the contest you want to participate in, but this caught my attention from today’s WSJ (gated):

Amid a larger effort to use medical data to improve health care, one company is trying something new: offering $3 million in prize money for the algorithm that can best predict when people are likely to be sent to the hospital.

A recent query to the blog from a reader states:

“Most patients of Primary Care Physicians are not aware that if their PCP is affiliated with a teaching hospital, and his doctor sends that patient to the hospital, his care will NOT be supervised by the PCP who that patient knows, trusts and know the medical history of the patient.  That patient will be cared for by a ‘Hospitalist’ a resident and perhaps 2 or more students, and this combination changes the first of every month.  This takes away from the patient his or her freedom of choice.  In spite of this most PCP do NOT tell their patients that this is the procedure if they place him in the hospital.  Don’t you think a patient has the right to know this information long before he or she is hospitalized?”