Engaging Hospitalists in the Case Management Process

Why Should You Attend:

RN case managers, social workers and case management leaders need to understand the role of the hospitalist, steps to ensure collaboration to ensure compliance with federal regulations, decreasing length of stay, and methods to improve case management outcomes with the role of the hospitalist.

In this session Ms. Cunningham will introduce the role of the hospitalist and the important aspects for staff RN case managers, social workers and case management leaders to ensure effective implementation and sustaining of this critical role. She will also discuss best practices for developing steps to ensure collaboration with this role. Additionally, she will discuss hospital outcomes that can be positively affected by the collaboration of the two roles.

The webinar will focus on not only strategies for aligning these two roles, but the impact they can have on Medicare spending per beneficiary, an important component of value-based purchasing, as well as other health care reform metrics (such as readmissions).

Areas Covered in the Webinar:

• Review of the hospitalist role, including various stages of the role
• Discussion of specialized hospitalists roles
• Examine critical strategies for working with hospitalists
• Implement a multidisciplinary team process for hospitalists, RN case managers and social workers
• Discuss best practices both RN case managers and case management leaders as they collaborate with hospitalists
• Describe best practices for auditing hospitalist and case management collaboration
• Discuss strategies for decreasing hospital risk for noncompliance with Conditions of Participation and the 2 midnight rule

Who Will Benefit:

• RN case managers
• Case management leaders
• Hospitalists and hospitalists leaders
• Senior leaders of hospitalists and/or case management departments

Beverly Cunningham
Consultant, Case Management Concepts LLC

Bev Cunningham is a founding partner of Case Management Concepts, LLC. She has a 25-year deep working knowledge of case management with specific expertise in denials management, patient flow and the role of the Case Manager and Social Worker in the Case Management process. She has served as a Commissioner on the Commission for Case Management Certification and is a fellow with the Advisory Board. Bev is also the former Vice President of Resource Management at Medical City Dallas Hospital.

She has written a book for hospital case managers—Core Skills for Hospital Case Managers and has written the utilization management chapter in the past two editions of CMSA’s book, Core Curriculum for Case management.

Topic Background:

The past twenty years hospitalists have been integrating acute care hospitals with the initial goal of decreasing length of stay. As the role of the hospitalist has evolved there has been an increased attention to collaboration with case managers and social workers to ensure not only a decreased length of stay, but compliance to federal and state regulations, as well as following contractual agreements with commercial payers.

Over the years the role of the hospitalist has become more specialized with expansion in to OB, ICU and pediatrics. These various specialized roles will also be discussed.

For these processes to be optimal and best-practice, there must be strong leadership in both the hospitalist group(s) and the case management department. Some hospitalist groups have not been able to impact hospital outcomes because of the gap of leadership coordination for both the hospitalist group and/or the case management department. Additionally, there are not always hospitalist dashboards to show the outcomes and to allow development of strategies to improve those outcomes not being met.

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