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Partner with seminar experts and your colleagues to develop innovative approaches to:

• Measuring the value of your hospital medicine program and identifying opportunities for improvement
• Creating a compensation model that will support your recruitment and retention efforts.
  
• Securing support for the hospitalist program, financial or otherwise, that is crucial to the programs success.
  
• Mapping the next steps in your hospital program's evolution.

How implementing a hospitalist program helped one hospital: What challenges could a hospitalist program help your facility solve? A hospitalist program success story

Milford (CT) Hospital, is a full-service medical center that offers state-of-the-art healthcare technology and procedures in a community hospital setting-an attractive option for patients and practitioners who seek an alternative to big, urban hospitals. Almost six years ago, the hospital began looking for strategies to cope with a growing problem: Almost 34,000 emergency department (ED) visits occurred each year at Milford Hospital, of which half were walk-in patients. About one-third of the patients admitted through the ED did not have an existing relationship with a physician on Milford's medical staff.

As a result, internists felt a need for additional physicians to help manage those patients. In addition, the hospital sought a way to provide direct physician coverage of the hospital around the clock. For Milford Hospital, the answer was clear: develop a sustainable hospitalist program.

After working through several issues-such as assembling a staff of physicians to adequately cover inpatient care needs, assuaging medical subspecialists' concerns that the hospitalists might reduce their consultations (which did not occur), and dealing with surgical subspecialists' objections to the fact that staff internists' ED call responsibilities were reduced but surgeons' were not-Milford launched a successful program with five hospitalists. According to Richard E. Rohr, MD , FAC P, director of hospitalists at Milford Hospital and an advisory board member of Hospitalist Management Advisor, "The hospitalist program has provided for increased patient safety around the clock and improved backlogs of patients awaiting admission from the emergency room."

Rohr also notes that the hospitalist program has led to a decrease in patients' average length of stay to 4.5 days. Nurses are more satisfied because hospitalists are consistently available to help them with sick patients, and families are able to speak directly with a physician when they visit the hospital rather than waiting for their PCP to find time to come to the facility.

What challenges could a hospitalist program help your facility solve? Regardless of which inpatient medicine challenges your organization faces-whether you are planning to launch a hospitalist program or already have one up and running-attending the HCPro seminar Developing and Maximizing Your Hospitalist Program: A Symposium by Hospitalist Management Advisor will give you the tools and resources you need to meet them head-on.

Rohr advises hospitals that are thinking about starting a hospitalist program to "Stop thinking and start doing. No hospital will be competitive in the future without hospitalists, and it will take several years to recruit enough physicians to take over the bulk of patient care."

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Additional programs being held in Chicago :

Attend more than one program and receive discounted rates. Sign up for 2 programs and save 15%, register for 3 programs and save 20%. Call 800/801-6661 for details.

Group Rates Available. Call (800) 801-6661

September 25-26, 2008 | Hyatt Regency Chicago, Chicago, IL