In This Issue of The Hospitalist eWire

eWIRE EXCLUSIVE  |  CONTINUING EDUCATION

HM09 Keynote Speaker: Let's Work Together

Mark Chassin, MD, president of The Joint Commission, sees value in collaboration with hospitalists

By Mark Leiser

Mark Chassin, MD, isn’t quite sure what he’ll say when he steps to the podium to deliver the keynote address at sold-out HM09.

“At the pace everything is changing, it’s hard to know exactly what I’ll want to talk about,” says Chassin, president of The Joint Commission.

He is certain about one thing, however: the importance of reaching out to and connecting with hospital-based physicians. “Accreditation alone is not enough,” Dr. Chassin says. “We need active engagement of the hospital medicine practitioners in all of the quality and safety initiatives The Joint Commission has set in motion.

“It’s also important," he continues, "for us to hear from physicians on the front lines ... about how our efforts are working and where we need to fill in gaps.”

Since taking over as president of The Joint Commission in January 2008, Dr. Chassin has pushed for the organization to adopt business management strategies like Six Sigma and the Toyota Production System. The goal is to work with hospitals and health systems that also use these strategies to rectify recurring safety and quality problems, such as medication reconciliation, infection control breakdown, and wrong-site/wrong-side surgery.

His ultimate goal is to make sure the commission and organizations that deliver care work together to transform healthcare into a high-reliability industry.

“The legacy of what The Joint Commission used to be sometimes gets caricatured as a bunch of silly rules and hoops people have to jump through that have nothing to do with patient care,” Dr. Chassin says. “That caricature really is a thing of the past.”

To read an in-depth interview with Dr. Chassin, see the June issue of The Hospitalist.

HM 2009 will take place May 14-17 in Chicago. For more information, visit SHM's Web site.

eWIRE EXCLUSIVE  |  MOVERS AND SHAKERS

Nurses Honor New Jersey Hospitalist

Staff embrace communication, relationships fostered by HM model

By Richard Quinn

Sutharsanam Veerappan, MD, a pediatric hospitalist, learned while on a family vacation to India that his New Jersey hospital had chosen him as 2008's Physician of the Year. So he did what anyone 7,000 miles from work would do: He cut short the family time to receive an honor from his other family.

"Dr. Veerappan just gets it," says Jeanne Whaley, RN, manager of the Maternity and Newborn Care Center at Hunterdon Medical Center (HMC) in Raritan Township, N.J. "He understands what it means to be a team."

HMC nurses say honoring a hospitalist is a testament to how comfortable the staff is with having a full-time hospitalist to rely on, as opposed to the pre-HM model of private-practice doctors making rounds.

Dr. Veerappan, medical director for newborn and pediatric services, is a familiar face in the maternity ward, as well as the pediatrics and emergency departments. He's known for bringing in coffee cake in the mornings, pizza on busy days, and even making accommodations for nursing staff to attend conferences.

Hospitalists aren't "always dashing out to the office," says Ardath Youngblood, RN, MN, a perinatal educator at HMC. "There's a depth of relationship that develops sometimes with a hospitalist because they're around more and available more. It definitely builds teamwork."

For his part, Dr. Veerappan shies away from the attention he's been given for receiving the award. He is proud of the accomplishment, but he still views HM as a team sport that involves nurses and physicians from other departments. Still, he acknowledges his constant presence in the hospital affords him advantages in working with both staff and patients.

"The communication is the key part here," Dr. Veerappan says. "When [nurses or patients] have questions, we just show up in the room and answer them."