Medical Staff

Small hospitals may win with hybrid schedule

Medical Staff Briefing, September 1, 2009

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Many small hospitals are stuck: They would benefit from a hospitalist program, but there isn’t enough patient volume to justify launching one. This is the quandary that 206-bed Metro Health Hospital in Wyoming, MI, faced eight years ago before it established a hybrid hospitalist scheduling model.

Rather than hiring hospitalists to compete with the internal medicine department at Metro Health, the hospital approached the internal medicine physicians to establish a hybrid scheduling model.

The schedule allows physicians to alternate between inpatient and outpatient work by spending one week in the hospital followed by three weeks in their independent practices. “What we decided to do was design a system where instead of being in both places every day, you are in one or the other,” says Matthew Blair, DO, director of the hospitalist program at Metro Health.

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Medical Staff Briefing.

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