The panel tasked with finding a buyer to take over the Prince George's County (MD) hospital system convened for a final meeting May 21 after two years of study, recommending measures to prop up the existing hospital operator but ultimately passing the ball to state and county officials to find a more permanent solution, the Washington Post reports. Members of the Prince George's County Hospital Authority said that although nine interested bidders had come forward, most only wanted to buy select pieces of the system. They said that the process was hindered by the economic downturn and that bidders wanted to see the system—which serves as many as 180,000 patients a year, many of them uninsured—stabilized before taking the risk of acquiring it.
Sen. David Vitter has sent a letter to HHS head Kathleen Sebelius asking her to remove from the agency's website the controversial breast cancer screening recommendations issued last fall by the United States Preventive Services Task Force. Vitter cites an amendment he offered to the healthcare overhaul bill banning those recommendations from being used by insurers to restrict or deny coverage of mammography. The USPSTF recommendations state mammography in women under 50 should not be a blanket policy and should instead be on a case-by-case basis. They also say women between 50 and 74 can get a mammogram every other year rather than annually.
If you still think a practitioner's clinical skills trump interpersonal skills, think again. A poll of medical staff services departments nation-wide revealed that 68% of medical staffs take behavioral evaluations as seriously as clinical evaluations, and exercises disruptive behavior policies as needed.
This is good news for hospitals. Unchecked bad behavior among practitioners can lead to anything from dings on accreditation surveys to costly legal battles with patients.
Medical staffs looking to improve their disruptive behavior policies may use the following three tips as a starting point.
1. Identify the process for handling disruptive behavior. It's essential that medical staffs develop a roadmap for handling a practitioner's disruptive behavior, should it occur. "Our hospital tries to handle it at the lowest level first, with the manager of the department," says Becky Cochran, CPMSM, CPCS, director of medical staff services at San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington, NM, and a public member of the New Mexico Medical Board. If the practitioner's disruptive behavior continues after discussing the matter with his or her manager, then the departmental chair is alerted of to the issue.
2. Have a mechanism for tracking and trending behavior. The most challenging disruptive behaviors to discipline are the ones that appear to occur irregularly. For example, if a practitioner is argumentative two days out of every five days he or she works, peers will notice, but they may be hard pressed to give examples in a disciplinary meeting. However, if the medical staff services department tracks such behavior, it can more easily detect a clear pattern of disruptive behavior and address it accordingly.
3. Develop a fast track disciplinary process for egregious behavior. Serious actions call for serious measures. If a practitioner commits an egregious action, such as blatant sexual harassment or physical violence, it would be inappropriate for the medical staff to follow the same process it would for a practitioner with a minor offence, such as being overly sarcastic. At the same time, regulatory standards require hospitals to adhere to their policies. Therefore, the medical staff needs to create a policy with separate pathways for disciplining serious disruptive behavior and minor disruptive behavior.
"Most people's policies say if it's egregious enough, it will go straight to your medical executive committee, and your bylaws will say your chief of staff or the CEO will have the ability and authority to suspend that physician's clinical privileges," says Cochran.
Emily Berry is an associate editor for Briefings on CredentialingandCredentialing Resource Center Connection, and manages the Credentialing Resource Center. You can reach her at eberry@hcpro.com.
A group of community hospitals in Southeastern Massachusetts has partnered with doctors from an out-of-state academic medical center to provide cancer treatment. Southcoast Health System has signed an affiliation agreement with doctors from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to help provide patient care, including advising the hospital on drug regimens, pain control, and chemotherapy safety, and providing opinions on difficult cases. The partnership, which requires Southcoast to pay the Texas physicians group an undisclosed sum in return for its expertise, is intended to raise the quality of care, the Boston Globe reports.
With changes poised to reshape the medical industry, North Carolina-based WakeMed hospital system has hired a national consulting firm to help navigate the new landscape. Wellspring+Stockamp Consulting of Chicago will spend the next year helping WakeMed officials find new ways to improve quality, strengthen revenue, and reduce expenses. The firm will compare WakeMed's operations with successful medical centers across the country, and suggest improvements.
Baptist Medical Plaza has opened its second Broward County, FL, location with a new outpatient center that offers diagnostic imaging and urgent care. Lissette Egues, the director of government and community affairs with Baptist Health, said the center's goal is to minimize wait time and to have 90% of its urgent-care patients treated within two hours of arrival, which she said is much shorter than many hospital emergency rooms. The Urgent Care unit is staffed by an emergency-trained physician in addition to a team of registered nurses who monitor 10 treatment rooms and a triage area, Egues said.