I gave you a game the other day called patient shuffle which gives you the experience on how to run a hospital. This game won't show you how hospitals get paid, but it will give you a sense of the chaos that goes on in hospital care.
If you're looking for how not to run a hospital or a hospitalist programs, look no further than St Peter's Hospital in Helena, MT. How do they think a hospital program should be paid for? By charging community primary care doctors for the right to use hospitalists at their hospital.
Helena Physicians' Clinic responded by removing their hospital privileges and not going through the physician credentialing process at St Peter's anymore. In other words, they are taking their business elsewhere.
If you want to know how not to run a hospital, simply call the administrative geniuses at St Peter's hospital in Helena, MT and ask them how they possibly got into a position of leadership in their community. Hospitalists are worth their weight in gold. Hospitals should be crawling over backward to establish a hospitalist program who's SHM/MGMA physician compensation survey suggests is worth over $100,000 in subsidy per hospitalist, per year, but who's hospitalist advantage can bring in 57 million dollars a year in additional hospital revenue.
If you're looking for great hospital leadership, don't go to Helena, MT. It seems to me these people lack the vision to see past the tip of their nose. Making a primary care doctor pay for the right not to see their patients? How ridiculous. I think this hospital is doomed. They should be paying primary care doctors NOT to come to the hospital anymore, considering all the advantages a hospitalist brings to the table.
