Recently, officials at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, a regional health care system in Orange County, Calif., decided to rebrand their 60-year-old institution. The not-for-profit health care system is now known simply as Hoag. They weren’t just going for brevity. They specifically wanted to drop the word "hospital."
Dr. Richard Afable, Hoag’s president and CEO, recently spoke to a small meeting of hospitalists in Las Vegas and explained that the name change reflects a shift toward providing more services outside of the hospital. Hoag’s hospitals do a great job treating the acutely ill, he said, but the leadership wanted to reach out to people in the community before they got sick enough to make it to the hospital.
Photo by Mary Ellen Schneider/ Elsevier Global Medical News
Dr. Richard Afable
So officials at Hoag have been working to offer more services related to conditions that either slightly touch the hospital or don’t touch it at all, Dr. Afable said. For example, the system has beefed up its offerings around diabetes care and now provides counseling on how to manage the disease and prevent complications. In the old days, they would have waited for someone to have a heart attack or lose a limb before taking care of them, Dr. Afable said. They also are developing community-based programs for breast cancer, a condition that today is treated primarily outside of the hospital.
And Dr. Afable advised hospitalists to consider following Hoag’s lead and look how they can be involved in care outside of the hospital. He noted the example of CareMore, a medical group and health plan based in California, which is being acquired by the health insurer Wellpoint, Inc. Under CareMore’s model, hospitalists not only care for patients while they are in the hospital, but also after they leave. Once a patient is stable, they are sent back to receive the rest of their care from their primary care physician. Since CareMore uses a capitation payment model, there aren’t concerns about which physician gets the payment for the post-discharge care. The model is food for thought for hospitalists as care becomes increasingly less hospital centric, Dr. Afable said.
— Mary Ellen Schneider