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Featured blog post: Health reform and the hospitalist

Hospitalist Leadership Connection, June 16, 2009

Congress is likely to enact some sort of health reform before the year is out, and we can be sure that it will change hospital medicine in some manner, but details are still hazy.

We will see some expansion of coverage to the currently uninsured, which would help hospital medicine groups, but I am not sure that we will achieve universal coverage this year. Don’t look for a single payer system–this country is too pluralistic to accept that. Private insurers will continue to play an important role, and you’ll probably keep all or most of your present billing numbers.

“Quality” is going to be the watchword. Atul Gawande has galvanized the debate with his New Yorker piece about wasteful utilization in McAllen, TX. Higher quality is associated with lower production costs in manufacturing, and there is at least some evidence that this will work in healthcare. The Physician Quality Reporting Initiative will probably have some serious money attached to it (if you can actually collect). There will be a big push on hospital readmissions, and there will be much pressure on hospitalists to ensure that they communicate discharge plans to primary physicians and patients. . . Read more of “Health reform and the hospitalist” post by Richard Rohr, MD, MMM, FACP, FHM on HospitalistLeadership.com.

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