eHospitalists: Implementing a New Frontier - Business Plan

PROJECT SUMMARY

There is an outpacing of demand for hospitalists. Hospitalists are typically internal medicine or family practice trained physicians who provide care to hospitalized patients, patients who anticipate a hospitalization or patients immediately discharged from a hospital. The patients may be inpatient, observation or outpatients. Hospitalists provide care in hospitals of all sizes, from critical access hospitals to large tertiary hospitals. Most hospitals request the presence and availability of hospitalists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The demand for hospitalists continues to increase, even as the acute care patient demand has leveled-off. This is partially because many specialists request the daily or intermittent service of hospitalists to care for subspecialty patients who have multiple co-morbidities.

The continued demand for hospitalist services has placed a stress on many hospital systems to find hospitalists. In order to meet this demand, hospitalist groups have begun exploring the offering of hospitalist services with appropriate technological support. Telemedicine is not a new frontier, however eHospitalist is a newer frontier for hospital medicine.

eHospitalist is a virtual hospitalist program offered through visual and audio technologies to diagnose and treat hospitalized patients from a remote location. This business plan will focus on establishing and implementing eHospitalist services within a health system’s employed hospitalist group to achieve operational efficiency, enhancing access to care and improving overall quality provided by a hospitalist practice.  The first phase of the eHospitalist program will be to serve a rural hospitalist service.