Published in the November 2007 issue of Today’s Hospitalist
Is your hospitalist group in need of some serious renovation? That may sound like an odd question, particularly if your group is relatively young, but it appears to increasingly be on the mind of hospital administrators.
Our cover story this month examines several hospitalist groups that are not only being renovated, but in some cases gutted and rebuilt from scratch. You might wonder how a group that’s only a few years old could develop such serious problems that it has to be taken offline while it’s rebuilt, but that’s happening.
In some cases, programs grow so quickly that they lose control and break down. In others, programs succumb to the daily grind of problems that plague hospital medicine, a list that includes everything from sign-out problems to staffing issues.
Rebuilding these programs is far from easy, and it’s fascinating to read about hospitalists who are stepping into the fray. These physicians are often making difficult choices as they try to turn a program around.
This notion of hospitalists struggling to improve their programs is the focus of a new blog that we’re launching this month on the Today’s Hospitalist Web site. It is being written by Erik DeLue, MD, a veteran hospitalist who recently took the helm of a hospitalist program at a health system in New Jersey.
In his blog, Dr. DeLue will talk about the issues he confronts as he rehabilitates a community-based hospitalist program. Far from taking an academic view of hospital medicine, this new blog will examine the front-line issues that hospitalists in community-based programs face.
As Dr. DeLue points out in one of his entries, hospital medicine as a specialty demands creative thinking. His blog “along with the stories in Today’s Hospitalist magazine “will provide examples of just that type of innovation.
Edward Doyle
Editor and Publisher
edoyle@todayshospitalist.com
