Bridge Over Troubled Water
Bridge Over Troubled Water
I be Mbanu, MD, MBA, MPH, became medical director of the adult hospitalist department at Bon Secours St. Mary's Hospital in Richmond, Va., about six months ago. Since then, he's been besieged by a torrent of reform-based challenges he says make his job exponentially more difficult than that of medical directors just a few years ago.
(Enlarge Image)
Small-group discussion and success stories are key elements of HM13.
Accountable-care organizations (ACOs), value-based purchasing, and discussions about bundled payments for episodic care are changing rapidly, and as a new administrator in a group with 24 hospitalists and three nonphysician providers (NPPs), he felt he needed to attend his first SHM annual meeting to keep up.
"The landscape in health care is rapidly evolving, at a frantic pace," Dr. Mbanu says. "I essentially came here to just try to get a condensed source of information on how to manage the changes that are coming through the pipeline, and how to effectively run my department."
Managing a practice is a challenge, and many of the more than 2,700 attendees at HM13 said the four-day confab's focus on the topic was a major draw. From a rebooted continuing medical education (CME) pre-course appropriately named "What Keeps You Awake at Night? Hot Topics in Hospitalist Practice Management" to dozens of breakout sessions on the topic, it's clear that successful practice management is a concern for many hospitalists.
"Before, the drivers were pretty clear," Dr. Mbanu says. "Volume, productivity. Now we're switching more toward a business model that's changing from volume to value. Trying to adapt to that change is pretty challenging.
"Now it's critical to really understand the environment."
Introduction
I be Mbanu, MD, MBA, MPH, became medical director of the adult hospitalist department at Bon Secours St. Mary's Hospital in Richmond, Va., about six months ago. Since then, he's been besieged by a torrent of reform-based challenges he says make his job exponentially more difficult than that of medical directors just a few years ago.
(Enlarge Image)
Small-group discussion and success stories are key elements of HM13.
Accountable-care organizations (ACOs), value-based purchasing, and discussions about bundled payments for episodic care are changing rapidly, and as a new administrator in a group with 24 hospitalists and three nonphysician providers (NPPs), he felt he needed to attend his first SHM annual meeting to keep up.
"The landscape in health care is rapidly evolving, at a frantic pace," Dr. Mbanu says. "I essentially came here to just try to get a condensed source of information on how to manage the changes that are coming through the pipeline, and how to effectively run my department."
Managing a practice is a challenge, and many of the more than 2,700 attendees at HM13 said the four-day confab's focus on the topic was a major draw. From a rebooted continuing medical education (CME) pre-course appropriately named "What Keeps You Awake at Night? Hot Topics in Hospitalist Practice Management" to dozens of breakout sessions on the topic, it's clear that successful practice management is a concern for many hospitalists.
"Before, the drivers were pretty clear," Dr. Mbanu says. "Volume, productivity. Now we're switching more toward a business model that's changing from volume to value. Trying to adapt to that change is pretty challenging.
"Now it's critical to really understand the environment."
