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Ask the expert: Who should be on the hospitalist performance team and committee?

Hospitalist Leadership Connection, October 19, 2010

Hospitalist programs develop a performance scorecard with the overall goal of monitoring and documenting provider and practice performance, as well as providing root cause analysis and identifying areas of improvement.

To ensure that your program attains these goals, it should create a hospitalist performance team to support these initiatives. The performance team should include the following:

• Hospital quality assurance and/or performance improvement director
• Vice president of medical affairs/chief medical officer
• Chief financial officer
• Hospital administrator providing hospitalist program oversight
• Hospitalist clinical director
• Hospitalist practice manager

The performance committee may also include a representative from various departments on an as-needed basis. These guests may include the physician chief of service from the emergency, cardiology, pulmonology, surgery, pathology, radiology, internal medicine, family medicine, or pediatric departments. Guests may also include directors from various hospital departments, such as:

• Information systems
• Nursing
• Social services
• Case management
• Utilization review
• Physical therapy
• Occupational therapy
• Pharmacy
• Laboratory
• Radiology
• Cardiopulmonary
• Surgery
• Emergency

The committee’s first task is to identify sources of clinical and financial data. The second task is to develop systems to consolidate this information, which will improve the hospital’s and the hospitalist program’s ability to generate specific reports (e.g., for a specific metric) and create a composite picture. The committee’s third task is to apply the data to make recommendations regarding hospital and hospitalist practice policies, procedures, and protocols.

The above excerpt is adapted from The Hospitalist Program Management Guide, Second edition, published by HCPro, Inc.

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