Twenty-five years ago, hospital medicine was born in response to clear hospital and patient needs during a chaotic time in U.S. health care.

With this, the hospital medicine value equation, quality divided by cost, provided the framework for both how hospitalist leaders managed their own practice, and how hospital executives evaluated their hospital medicine programs. 

Today, we in health care again find ourselves in a chaotic time, facing:  

• A dramatic, COVID-induced exiting of clinicians from the workforce 

• A rise in inpatient acuity combined with geographically disparate surges in volume 
• Increased pressure on reimbursement, especially for hospitals dependent on Medicare rates. 

With the current combined challenges, hospitals need an answer to the familiar problems of how to provide 24/7 quality care to patients, even during an influx of inpatient admissions, while maintaining financial solvency.  

A strategic solution to these challenges can be found by once again leveraging the historical strengths of the agile hospitalist, while also evolving the value equation for hospital medicine care delivery and deploying a new quality plus cost-value equation. 

The result of this new quality-cost value equation for hospital medicine will allow hospitals not just to survive this chaotic time, but to increase and improve care to their communities.  

In this white paper, we break down each of the different components of hospital medicine to individual parts and puts them back together, creating a new whole that offers so much more. We identify solutions and enumerates the benefits of integrating clinical solutions including: 

• Reducing clinician burnout 
• Decreasing cost and risk 
• Increasing capacity and optimized resources 
• Improving performance in value-based models