Today, hospitals face more issues and challenges than ever before. Certification and scope of practice are key issues. But even greater is the skyrocketing costs of healthcare. The more the industry tries to rein in costs and streamline care, the bigger role hospitalists play. Hospitalists address a wide range of issues from efficiency of care, pay-for-performance measures and increasing patient capacity, to quality incentives and quality improvement in patient safety and care.

There’s a general consensus that hospital medicine is in an excellent position to make a difference. As the industry’s leading provider of 24/7 in-house OB/GYN hospitalist programs, Ob Hospitalist Group partners with over 130 hospitals across the nation. They see the program as an investment in their women’s healthcare line and the cornerstone of their patient safety and business development efforts.

Our vast experience has taught us that while each hospital is unique, many hospitals share the following objectives:

• Improve patient safety and satisfaction through the immediate availability of specialists in the management of high-risk obstetric encounters and emergencies.
• Prevent the loss of physicians and delivery volume (knowing that a loss of obstetric volume will most likely be associated with a loss in elective surgery volume).
• Retain transports (which increase patient satisfaction and revenue).
• Increase market share by reaching out to physicians who are splitting deliveries with their competition or who are exclusive with their competition.
• Increase market share by reaching out to family practitioners, mid-level providers and clinics.
• Grow their high-risk service and become known as the leader in obstetrics for their market.
• Foster the relationship with obstetric patients so that they choose the hospital for their other healthcare needs (and those of their families).

Many of these hospitals considered an in-house solution or attempted to implement their own program before asking us to develop a program for them. Some of the challenges they faced are as follows:

• Availability of physicians/timeliness of implementation: Recruiting and vetting physicians can be challenging, and many hospitals or local companies simply do not have the ability to recruit, train and retain top-quality physicians throughout the life of the program. Hospital-developed programs falter when they are unable to backfill positions when physicians move on. OBHG can guarantee physician availability throughout the life of the program due to our large network from which we use to place physicians.
• Private physician partnerships: A hospitalist program will not be successful if local physicians do not support it. Hospital-developed programs faltered because the local physicians did not trust the physicians that were brought on board (either due to competitive considerations or concerns about their clinical expertise). OBHG enjoys a reputation for providing highly-skilled, board- certified physicians to whom private physicians are willing to entrust their patients. 
• Blurred line of roles/responsibilities: Some hospitals that have attempted to develop their own programs employ hospitalists that are also serving as private physicians and as obstetric hospitalists. There are multiple billing/revenue implications of this blurred role, and it has a negative impact on patient safety. 
• Inadequate management/oversight: Several of our current hospital partners initially tried to develop hospitalist programs in-house but eventually asked us to develop a customized program for them in order to leverage our expertise concerning the clinical and financial management of an obstetric hospitalist program. We have a support staff of over 200 people who focus on billing and coding compliance, data analytics, business development, patient safety/risk management and hospital/physician relations. Furthermore, we take the best practices we see throughout our network and constantly strive to make our programs better. Lastly, we constantly report metrics that track the clinical and financial health of each program so that the hospital is aware of its impact. 
• Obstetric emergency department coding, billing and compliance: We have encountered several hospitals that attempted to develop their own program or utilize a local company that has not been compliant and has paid the price. OBED billing and compliance, as well as Obstetrical Service Agreements, can be nuanced, and our team makes sure that hospitals are compliant and billing correctly.

Many of our current hospital partners approached us when they realized that they did not have the time or resources to develop an effective program. In some cases, the decision has been driven by physicians, and in others the decision to reach out to us has been precipitated by an adverse event. Wherever you are in this process, OBHG is eager to help you implement a hospitalist program customized to meet your specific needs and goals.

We invite you to discover more about OBHG and the advantages that our customized programs deliver to our partner hospitals, physicians and patients. Or contact an OBHG representative today via [email protected] or 800.967.2289.