As we mentioned in last month's column, an increasing number of hospitals are choosing to employ physicians. Unfortunately, many organizations have a shotgun approach to employment and hire any physician who qualifies for medical staff membership and clinical privileges. Or worse,...
Many medical staff and hospital leaders believe that employment is a panacea for misaligned incentives that currently characterize physician-hospital relationships. The bottom line is that physician employment can relieve some symptoms of misalignment if implemented correctly, but it is not a...
Last month, I wrote about a problem many organizations face when implementing clinical service lines. The way many clinical service lines are currently structured, it is unclear who owns the responsibility of ensuring physician performance—the organized medical staff, through its relevant...
Hospitals and health systems are increasingly interested in designing and implementing clinical specialty service lines. Clinical service lines are designed to cut across organizational and disciplinary boundaries to organize patient care around one of the following:
• Specific diseases,...
As physician practices transition to value-based care and incorporate population health management (PHM) solutions into their day-to-day workflows, there are opportunities to close the communication gaps that can lead to opioid abuse. By aggregating and analyzing data across the care continuum,...
The credentials committee chair reports directly to the medical executive committee (MEC) and the board of directors. Most often, reporting will be needed regarding applicants for medical staff appointment and staff members eligible for reappointment.
One of the most common situations that causes attribution difficulties is when care of a patient is handed off to multiple practitioners. Often, staff will list in the medical record the name of the physician who admitted the patient; however, throughout the patient's stay, the record is not...
In 2014, The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) predicted that in the next 10 years, one-third of all doctors currently practicing will retire, and there will be 90,000 fewer doctors than needed to serve the nation's aging population. The expanding role of midlevel extenders is an...
This series was designed to offer a guide to medical staff leaders, MSPs, and anyone else in an organization that is dealing with the fundamental shift in the relationship between medical staff and health system as the latter increasingly becomes the employer of choice for many physicians.
Risk management in hospitals and healthcare organizations is very complex. Successful risk management programs require a systematic approach for detecting, tracking, and recording unusual occurrences as well as establishing proactive measures to mitigate risks along multiple fronts.
