Hospitalist and Inpatient Care Standards

The next meeting of the Department of Medicine will be held on January 19, 2010 at 6 PM in the Community Conference room at Gulf Coast Medical Center to discuss the proposed standards for hospitalists. Please review the standards prior to the meeting. Please see our forum for a discussion thread about this topic. We are interested in your opinions.

Draft Standards for Hospitalists and Inpatient Care 1-12-2009

Board of Directors Meeting Schedule

Our Board Meetings are open to all of our members. If you are interested in becoming more involved, please consider attending. Meetings are held in the second floor conference room at the IMA office on Metro Parkway at 6 PM. Our next meeting is on Monday, January 25, 2010.

Membership Roster

Please click on the link to the left for a list of our members.

EMR and Interoperability

On November 4, we attended a presentation and demo of dbMotion (www.dbmotion.com), a system currently in successful use by University of Pittsburgh. This software pulls together patient information from multiple medical record platforms. We are gathering further information to assess the feasibility of implementing such a solution in our community. We have two more demos scheduled in the near future.

Health Care Reform

Health Care Reform is looking more like a reality. House Bill 3962 was passed by a slim margin on Saturday, November 7, 2009. The bill is 1990 pages in length, so we will await detailed review. One of the concepts mentioned multiple times in the bill is Accountable Care Organizations and  other alternative payment programs. These programs are encouraged. While there are clearly shortcomings, we can safely assume that major changes are coming. We are currently involved in the ACO Learning Project, and it has become apparent that in order to participate, we need to develop an integrated system in our community. This is consistent with the mission statement of IPALC. We have been examining the concept of Clinical Integration as the basis for an integrated model. We are planning to hold a workshop on this topic in February, 2010. In the meantime, please browse these sections on our website to get up to speed.  

Read the House bill (PDF)

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/07/health.care/index.html

Hospitalist Issues

As some of you may know, concerns have been raised about the quality of care provided by the various hospitalists and hospitalist groups who are working in our community. Apparently, a number of patient complaints have been made directly to the hospital board. The board has thus been compelled to respond, and has requested that standards for hospitalist care be developed and implemented.
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ACO Workgroup--Are you interested in learning more?

Accountable Care Organizations is one of the new payment models being advocated by Medicare. It appears that the days of fee for service payment for medical care are numbered. We all need to become knowledgeable about the future of how we deliver and are paid for providing medical care. In cooperation with LMHS, we are participating in the Brookings/Dartmouth ACO Learning Network. This program provides us with an opportunity to learn about this and other payment models that are changing the focus to providing more cost effective and higher quality care.  We encourage you to review the resources about ACOs that are available on the IPALC web site, http://www.ipalc.org/Accountable_Care_Organizations.htm. We also encourage you to look at related models such as Medical Home and Clinical Integration. Please see the link bar on the left side of this page.

If you would like to participate in the webinars and have access to additional information about this topic, please contact Dr. Penuel at 239-939-9939. Our next meeting will be held on October 1, 2009 at 6 PM.

What is Clinical Integration anyway?

Since the inauguration of our new president, Barack Obama, it appears that the pace of change in medicine is accelerating. Increasing attention is being focused on the unsustainable growth of medical care costs. None of us know what is going to happen, but we can all be certain that drastic changes are going to occur in healthcare. Our view is that for physicians to be successful, we must be united and meaningfully organized.

An important aspect of our mission is to disseminate information regarding health care issues. We are using the web site to amass information to help physicians more clearly understand the issues and actively participate in the process of developing our future. If we do not fill this leadership void, our fate will be determined by the hospital.

Improved communication between physicians and other providers is an essential component of the integration process. We are working to understand the systems that are in place in order to figure out how to achieve this level of communication.

The model that appears to hold the greatest promise for our future success is Clinical Integration. We are actively researching this concept to determine how it can be implemented to better meet the needs of our patients and physicians. Please join us as we endeavor to create the future of quality medical care in our community.

IPALC is an organization open to all independent physicians practicing in Lee County, Florida. For information about how to join, please contact us.

Slide Presentation from General Meeting September 29, 2009

So Runs the World

This blog was created by Dr. Jon Burdzy. We appreciate his comments regarding IPALC.

EMR Presentation to Lee County Medical Society

EMR Survey #2 Final Results

EMR Survey #1 : Summary Results 

See our EMR page for the latest news and journal articles regarding electronic medical records

We are proud to announce that we have a total of 136 members supporting our organization with their dues and 325 physicians in 82 groups entered in our Physician Directory. Our newsletters are being sent to over 600 subscribers.

Our goal is to continue to increase the awareness of our organization and develop a physician referral system that will benefit all the independent physicians of our community.

We ask all our colleagues to get involved. If you are not receiving our newsletter, please follow the link on the left side of this page and sign up. We also invite you to join our discussion forum. We want to hear your concerns, ideas and comments.

If you would like to have your web site added to our list and your physicians entered in our directory, please contact us. There is no charge for this service.