This electronic newsletter was mailed in HTML format, allowing you to view graphics and interactive elements. If you received a text-only version of this email, and would like to view it in its original format, please visit the website.

  • Hospitalists and Stroke: Trend Set Opens Window for Improved Care
  • Is Your Hospital Medicine Program Progressive and Outperforming?
  • CDC's Emergency Preparedness & Response Website
  • Advancing Hospital Medicine, Advancing the Quality of Hospital Care

Transforming Hospital Care

Ready to profile a quality improvement effort and its impact on outcomes? Can you describe barriers to implementation, or the strategies attempting to overcome them? Have teamwork interactions affected the discharge process, utilization, or any other care delivery processes? Are applied pharmaceuticals or devices having an important net effect on care delivery?  Download the Instructions for Manuscript Submissions, or email specific questions to: JHM@hospitalmedicine.org.

Heedful Prescribing

The patient you just discharged has a 1-in-8 chance of having a preventable or ameliorable adverse drug event in the post-discharge period. Does your center's medication reconciliation process merely identify medication inconsistencies? Or do you have a step that is "actionable?" If not, consider introducing a simple and innovative one-page form, the Medication Discrepancy Tool. While learing how to make your medication reconciliation step clinically significant you can also review enduring principles for appropriate prescribing in elderly patients - and earn CME in the process - in the this month's spotlight case at AHRQ Web M&M.

-Commentary by Jerry H. Gurwitz, MD

Managing A Hospital Medicine Program: SHM's Best Practices

SHM's extremely popular one-day course, Best Practices in Managing a Hospital Medicine Program, will be offered in Atlanta, GA on November 9, 2005 in association with the 6th annual Southern Hospital Medicine Update sponsored by Emory University.

Practice Management Precourse

As hospital medicine programs mature, more and more hospitalists are recognizing the career value in being able to wield the skill set of an effective physician-administrator. Register online at the SHM website.

 

Now Enrolling: 2006 SHM Leadership Academy

January 9 - 12, 2006 in Tucson, AZ

When it comes to hospital medicine there is no natural course. So where you take your program is limited by your capacity to lead. Don't let the opportunity to strengthen your leadership abilities pass you by. Register now for the course that always sells out - and offers a skill set you will always use.

Leadership Academy

The 4-day course will be hosted January 9-12, 2006 at the Westin La Paloma Resort and Spa in Tuscon, Arizona. Register online.

 

Hospitalists and Stroke: Trend Set Opens Window for Improved Care

Stroke QI Resource Room Launches this Month at SHM Web

 

The trends are clear. Hospitalists are increasingly becoming the primary - and often solitary - providers of care for stroke patients. Meanwhile, stroke is a rapidly evolving field in which expeditious and careful inpatient care significantly affects outcomes. Now a new SHM web resource supports hospitalists rising to the challenge of delivering the best stroke care possible.

The SHM this month announces the launch of the Stroke Quality Improvement Resource Room. Hospitalists interested in leading better stroke care can now turn to the SHM web for support. Update your knowledge of stroke care while earning free CME from a multi-media lecture delivered by a nationally recognized neurohospitalist. Read an improvement profile from the Lead Hospitalist of Swedish Medical Center's Stroke Program: see how that institution achieved JCAHO Stroke Center certification while improving performance in stroke quality measures. View protocols submitted for acute cerebrovascular syndromes. Or interactively post your questions to a multidisciplinary panel of stroke, QI, and pharmacy experts.

In offering the new series of online QI resource rooms, SHM has taken a significant step towards tapping the great potential in hospital medicine: enhancing your ability to improve inpatient outcomes. The next step is yours.

At the SHM homepage, select Quality and Safety from the main navigation menu. From the pop-up menu select Quality Improvement Resource Rooms and then click Stroke Resource Room.

 

Is Your Hospital Medicine Program Progressive and Outperforming?

See Where You Stand by Participating in the 2005-06 Hospitalist Productivity and Compensation Survey

Is your compensation plan competitive? Does productivity stack up? Are staffing levels, turnover, service lines, or the use of NPs/PAs the norm? By participating in SHM's bi-annual survey of hospitalist productivity and compensation, you create our national benchmarks.

Your participation in the survey ensures your readiness to draw useful conclusions about your group, that you will be among the first to use the most up-to-date data on hospitalists, and all at no charge.

If you have received our invitation to participate in the survey, please reply as soon as possible. To see how the SHM is doing against the target of 400 responses, or if you have not received a survey and want to make sure your program is included, click here.

 

CDC's Emergency Preparedness & Response Website

Where to Turn, Whatever the Public Health Threat

 

Where have you turned for clinical advice in the wake of hurriances Katrina and Rita? Where would you turn if the next threat was a radiation emergency? A mass casualty? A bioterrorism agent? Or another natural disaster?

With its authority and national scope, your best first place to turn is the CDC's Emergency Preparedness & Response website. Get familiar with the resource. Consider using it to prepare as well as to respond. But at the very least bookmark it: http://www.bt.cdc.gov/.

Advancing Hospital Medicine, Advancing the Quality of Hospital Care

SHM Advocay Update from Washington

The SHM this month has endorsed ambitious proposed legislation which would: (1) address deficiencies in the current physician payment system; (2) spearhead the development of quality and efficiency metrics that reflect important care standards; and (3) establish financial incentives for physicians that are aligned with quality and safety goals.

The bill, H.R. 3617, would replace a scheduled 4.4% cut projected for 2006 under the current law, and replace it with a new formula that would mean a 1.5% payment update. Provisions in the bill would also create a framework designed to implement a patient-centered and evidence-based pay-for-performance program for Medicare. Read the letter sent by the SHM this month to the bill's sponsor, Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-CT).

 

Did You Know? According to one study, only 11.3% of stroke patients are attended exclusively by a neurologist.*

Did You Know? The 2006 SHM Research, Innovations, and Clinical Vignette (RIV) competition is now underway. View the abstract submission guidelines and submit your abstract online.

Did You Know? The first ever World Hospice and Palliative Care Day will be observed October 8, 2005. Whether your hospital medicine program has contemplated or developed palliative care services, the momentum of the event can be useful to your awareness - and maybe even your funding efforts. Read what you can do.

* Ringel SP. The Neurologist's Role in Stroke Management. Stroke. 1996 Nov;27(11):1935-6.

Web Editors: Jason Stein, MD and Geoffrey Marx, MD. Contact at webeditor@hospitalmedicine.org.

You have received this electronic newsletter as a benefit of membership in the Society of Hospital Medicine, or at the request of one of our members. If you received this email by mistake, or would like to be removed from our mailing list, send an email with "unsubscribe" in the subject field to MembershipRep@hospitalmedicine.org.

©Copyright 2005 Society of Hospital Medicine.  All rights reserved.