SHM & Hospital Medicine in the News: August 4 – 18, 2016
Check out the latest hospital medicine and SHM-related stories in mainstream and healthcare-centric news. For the full stories, click on the links below:
- As SHM celebrates the 20th anniversary of hospital medicine, multiple news outlets picked up the recent release of the special NEJM article penned by Drs. Bob Wachter and Lee Goldman. Coverage included Modern Healthcare, Medscape and UCSF News.
- Opioid prescribing continues to be a hot topic, with national coverage from The New York Times on the consequences of incorporating pain management into HCAHPS scores. Medscape also placed the spotlight on hospitalists’ struggle of balancing pain management and risk that a patient will overdose.
- Recent research has shown that geriatric hospital units focused on increased patient mobility could reduce readmissions. SHM member and former Research Committee member Dr. Heidi Wald was quoted in the report in Kaiser Health News.
After 20 Years, What’s Next for Hospitalists?
When the idea of a hospitalist — a doctor, usually an internist, based in the hospital and specializing in caring for patients with complex cases — first emerged 20 years ago, it was considered novel, even fringe. Today, hospitalists in the US rival pediatricians in number and have developed into an essential field in healthcare.
August 11, 2016
Modern Healthcare
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Hospital Medicine: Better, or Less Personal, Care?
Two contrasting perspectives on hospital medicine published August 10 in New England Journal of Medicine describe the potential for better, more efficient care, but also strain on the physician–patient relationship. “Today, hospital medicine is a respected field whose greatest legacies may be improvement of care and efficiency, injection of systems thinking into physician practice, and the vivid demonstration of our health care system’s capacity for massive change under the right conditions,” wrote Robert Wachter, MD, from the University of California, San Francisco, and Lee Goldman, MD, MPH, from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York City, in the first perspective.
August 12, 2016
Medscape
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The Hospitalist Turns 20: UCSF-Led Movement Has Revolutionized Inpatient Care
Fifty years ago, a visit to the emergency room likely meant that a nurse would take your vitals and then call your primary care doctor. Even intensive care units were staffed by rotating physicians borrowed from other departments, many with no special training in critical care. It seems obvious in hindsight that as specialized physicians in emergency medicine and critical care medicine came on the scene in the late 1960s, outcomes and coordination of care improved. But it took another three decades for a similar concept to spread to the rest of the hospital.
August 15, 2016
UCSF News
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Vexing Question on Patient Surveys: Did We Ease Your Pain?
Like countless other businesses, hospitals use customer surveys to improve their reputations, target areas for improvement and provide measures for determining employees’ promotions and raises. But as the country struggles to control the epidemic of overdoses and deaths from prescription opioids, many medical professionals and policy makers are challenging the wisdom of asking patients to rate how hospital employees manage pain. Doing so, they argue, creates a dangerous incentive for doctors to prescribe powerful and potentially addictive painkillers.
August 4, 2016
The New York Times
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Pain vs Overdose: Hospitalists Are Caught in the Middle
Hospitalists are struggling amidst a growing national clamor to tighten controls on prescribing opioid analgesics, particularly for patients who have chronic nonterminal or nonmalignant pain, hospital medicine leaders told Medscape. Hospitalists, who treat pain in hospitalized patients and must often include pain management as part of their discharge plans, find themselves struggling with how to balance pain relief with the risk that a patient will overdose, a recent study reports.
August 12, 2016
Medscape
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Elderly Patients in the Hospital Need to Keep Moving
At UAB Hospital-Highlands’ 26-bed geriatric unit, known as the Acute Care for Elders unit, or ACE, patients are encouraged to start moving as soon as they arrive. The unit is one of a few hundred around the U.S. that is attempting to provide better and more tailored care to geriatric patients. Research has shown that the units shorten patients’ stays in the hospital, reduce their likelihood of returning too soon after discharge and make it less likely they will be sent to a nursing home.
August 16, 2016
Kaiser Health News
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