It’s here. Today in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, SHM is publishing The Key Principles and Characteristics of an Effective Hospital Medicine Group: An Assessment Guide for Hospitals and Hospitalists.
That’s a mouthful of a title but really a simple document.
The main thrust of the paper is to be a guide and a tool for reflection for our nation’s hospital medicine groups (and maybe the C-suite too!). We are still a young specialty populated with young hospital medicine groups. The oldest groups we have are only 20-25 years old, many are less than five years. With that broad range of clinical experience comes a broad range of business and leadership experience, too. The Society asked itself, how could it put a tool in the hands of those leaders that showed them some of the key characteristics of our more experienced and successful groups. Over 200 leaders in the field of hospital medicine and even throughout the healthcare industry gave input, ideas, and refinements over an 18-month period.
The eight esteemed authors, all experts and leaders in practice management, helped shepherd the process and whittled down the many ideas captured into the document you see today. It is now 47 characteristics grouped under 10 major principles. Not every characteristic or principle applies to every kind of practice, for example an academic inner city practice may not share every characteristic for success with a rural small group in a community hospital, nevertheless every practice should be able to see themselves in this document and see things that they can aspire to.
As I hinted at above, this document is also meant to be read and used by those in the hospital C-suite. Just like we see a variety of hospital medicine practices, we also see a variety of understanding of how hospital medicine practices can best be supported by hospital leadership. Is there dedicated space for the hospitalists? Do the hospitalists have adequate support staff? Our hope is that this paper — which is also being promoted by other leadership groups, like the American Hospital Association, the Healthcare Financial Management Association, the Medical Group Management Association and the American College of Physician Executives — will reach the eyes of those who can better help our hospital medicine groups succeed and improve care for hospitalized patients.
In addition to creating this paper, the authors and the society will be taking further steps to validate and refine it. After publication, the group will be identifying 20 representative hospital medicine groups and asking them to review their own characteristics and processes in relation to the paper and then look at both applicability and ease of validation. This information will be brought back and analyzed to see if the characteristics as published are hitting the mark and if so how effective are they at being a guidepost for hospital medicine groups. What refinements will be needed to help even more groups going forward?
This is an exciting day for those of us who have been watching this paper unfold over the last few years. We look forward to hearing from hospitalists and hospital medicine leaders to make sure it is meeting their needs, so please share with your colleagues in the hospital.
Which characteristics are you already doing? Which do you to plan to work toward in 2014? Let us know in the comments.
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