Hospitalists

We are approaching our first year with having hospitalists at Floyd Memorial. The Board should be requesting some utilization numbers from the first year’s experience.

The primary care doctors have certainly found them to be a benefit as we no longer have to manage patients that are admitted through the emergency room who have no physician on staff. It had gotten to the point where we had to have 3 primary care physicians on-call every night for the emergency room because there could be anywhere from 5-12 patients admitted without physicians.

This became overwhelming for primary care physicians who already had to care for their own patients and then try to make it to their offices on time.

The Hospitalists now manage all of these patients who have no physician. The concern is that they may be utilizing more resources because they don’t know the patient and cannot follow them as an outpatient. Hospital lengths-of-stays and cost per admission may be higher. These are bad trends for a hospital.

The numbers are not yet available but many other hospitals also face this same issue. As you can see from the picture, many hospitals are restructuring the way hospitalists are paid to help encourage better performance. It becomes a difficult problem for hospitals, physicians and patients.


In addition to this, some hosptialists have different referral patterns and if they are not "connected" to the community, they may actually send patients across the river for follow-up care costing the hospital even more lost revenue.