If you're looking for ways to reduce your family practice office expenses you can review the recommendations from these medical practice management software vendors, or you can do what one of Happy's local physicians has started doing: Just stop taking call all together and arrange for no coverage.
In addition to doing a succinct hospital discharge summary with fast turn around time, part of the communication process between hospitalist and primary care physician is to always call them on discharge to discuss the hospital admission and any pertinent immediate needs on follow up.
This process is pretty much impossible on weekends. Rarely is the patient's personal physician on call when I call them to discuss the case. Ocassionally I'll get their partner who may know the patient a little, but rarely enough to offer any insight into their disease process.
More often than not, on a weekend discharge, I'll get a physician from another office all together who is cross covering for the physician of the patient I'm discharging. They could care less what the discharge plan is. I'm just wasting their time. I tell them I've already sent off a discharge summary and ask them if they would like to hear about the patient. I have a 100% response rate of no.
One doc in town has taken the cross cover step to the next level. I tried to call his office today. Here is the response I received.
Primary Care Office: Thank you for calling Dr XXXXX. If you have an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. If you need anything else between Firday at 5 pm and Monday at 8 am please contact your nearest emergency room for further assistance. Thank you. Good bye.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. You get what you pay for. If you aren't going to pay for doctors to be on call, you'll get doctors who aren't on call. And it's only just beginning. Something tells me hospitals might have to start ordering the sexy coffin calendar by the thousands if primary care docs won't return the hospitalist's phone calls anymore.
