Rolling out a new “product” in a nasty economy is usually a formula for disaster. But last week we held the first-ever “Hospitalist Mini-College,” and it was an rousing success. The idea was this: hospitalists have lots of places to go to hear clinical lectures, and now a few options for leadership training and to learn “how to run a program.'' ...

A quick heads-up for those of you thinking about attending this year’s Management of the Hospitalized Patient (MHP) conference, October 23-25 in SF… we’re adding a hands-on, small group “Hospitalist Mini-College” pre-course. I think it will be tremendous. This will be our 12th Annual MHP conference (co-sponsored by the Society of Hospital ...

In this month’s issue of the Joint Commission Journal of Quality and Patient Safety, I (with UCSF’s Adams Dudley and the American Hospital Association's Nancy Foster) tackle this provocative question. The answer may surprise you: yes (probably). The devil will be in the details.I hope you’ll have a chance to read the full article (the Joint ...

My friend Mark Smith, who runs the California HealthCare Foundation, once wryly observed, “Have you ever noticed that the doctors who talk about how much fun primary care is only practice it one afternoon a week?” I may have become the hospitalist version of Mark’s Ivory Tower internists, but I’ll take my chances.I just finished a two-week stint ...

Great quote by USC cardiologist Leslie Saxon (a reporter reached her on her cell phone as Leslie was shopping) on this week’s NEJM study on delayed defibrillation: “You’re better off having your arrest [here] at Nordstrom [than in a hospital]… because there are 15 people around me.”You’ve probably seen the study, a detailed analysis of ...

Today my pals Peter Lindenauer and Andy Auerbach (and colleagues) published the largest hospitalist outcomes study to date, in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is a rigorous, important piece of work. Let me try to add a bit of context.First, the What’s What. Using the massive database of the Premier system (which Peter has mined to ...

In an article in this month’s Journal of the American College of Surgeons (with a companion cover piece in the ACS’s Bulletin), four of my surgical colleagues – and this internist, perhaps to add a “cognitive” spin – describe UCSF’s “surgical hospitalist” program. It is an impressive story.When Dr. John Maa and his friends speak of a “surgical ...

Sorry, but today is the day for a tiny bit of Shameless Commerce – a quick plug for my new book, Understanding Patient Safety. I wouldn’t normally do this – I’m as brazenly promotional as anybody, mind you, but it does seem a bit cheesy – but then I saw Robert Reich promote his new book on his blog. I really like Robert Reich, Clinton I’s Labor ...

So Zagat will now be rating doctors, using the methods it perfected helping you find the best sushi in Brooklyn Heights. What’s next, Consumer Reports rating grad schools? Fodor rating auto mechanics?Whatever you think of Zagat’s cross-dressing, it again demonstrates the bottomless market for doctor rankings. HealthGrades, the Colorado company ...

The comments to my original post on this topic are so striking and passionate that I wanted to answer them in a new post rather than as another comment. First, ''LPrieto'' wrote, ''I think the death of outpatient general Internal Medicine is inevitable.''  Then ''C33333'' wrote that 16/17 of his or her (hard to sort out the gender of people ...