Conglomerate HM?
There also is flexibility in location, Dr. Holman notes.
“Now, with Cogent HMG, [hospitalists] have even more choices in terms of relocating within the same company,” he says. “So they can keep all of the benefits, keep all of the knowledge and familiarity of the system and philosophy of care that we employ, and just be able to transfer.”
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Emergency-Medicine Companies Increasingly Venture into HM
Hollywood, Fla.-based Hospital Physician Partners (HPP) was an ED business when more opportunity came knocking: Hospitals started asking them to provide some hospitalists to go with their emergency-room doctors.
Today, HPP is firmly in the hospital medicine business. And all signs point toward more and more hospitals hiring companies to handle both emergency care and inpatient care.
“In many ways, we expanded our efforts into hospitalist medicine as a result of requests from our hospital partners where we are providing emergency, ER medicine,” said Ed Weinberg, HPP’s chief operating officer.
“Their needs were such that they asked us to provide hospital medicine services. So from that, it became clear that it was an area that was really growing.
And that is something we are pursuing as vigorously as we are emergency medicine.”
Handling both emergency care and hospital medicine can help with the transition of the patient from the emergency room to a bed upstairs, he says.
“The efficiency is being able to transition a patient from being in the emergency department as an inpatient very seamlessly,” he said. “That’s where our efficiencies are, because we have physicians working who are carrying out the same philosophy.”
Out of the company’s 120 contracts, 15 of them are in hospital medicine, but it’s growing quickly, he says.
At EmCare, traditionally an emergency-medicine company that is now getting into hospital medicine, there are about 400 emergency-medicine programs and more than 50 HM programs.
Mark Hamm, CEO of EmCare Inpatient Services, says that it can be much more cost-effective to contract with one company for both hospitalist and emergency-medicine services—which he said hospitals have found attractive.
Their arrangements range from completely separate emergency and hospital medicine staffs to small, rural hospitals where ER physicians also do rounds.
Some hospitals “just don’t have the money for a full-time hospitalist and don’t really need one,” Hamm says.
The patient transitions tend to go more smoothly when both types of care are provided by EmCare. When they’re not, there can be slowdowns.
“Our goal is to quickly and appropriately move patients through the system,” he says. “If we have a hospitalist provider that’s not really on the same page, that can create bottlenecks. . . . But it’s a blip.
“Our goal is to sit down, even if it’s not an EmCare hospitalist, to sit down with that director and say, ‘Hey, look, let’s be the leader here, let’s work together and appropriately expedite these patients.’ We do the same thing on the hospitalist side.”
Inpatient care promises to be a big part of their future business, most executives agree.
“Hospital medicine,” Weinberg says, “is growing by leaps and bounds.” —TC
Dr. Houff says the majority of newly recruited physicians are coming out of residency but that the company is attracting physicians in the middle of their careers, along with physicians having backgrounds beyond internal medicine.
In Tallahassee at Capital Regional, Dr. Geers says that he feels there is support from the company that can protect his job quality, with “a little bit more room to negotiate with the hospital if the hospital wants us to take on new responsibilities.
