A delegation from Hamad Medical Corporation, which included the Corporate CMO, DIO, and Director of Emergency & Acute Medicine Transformation, in addition to the Chairman of the department of Internal Medicine and the Chief of the General Internal Medicine Division, visited several institutions in the USA to learn their experience with hospital medicine. These institutions include the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Johns Hopkins Hospital, The Duke Medical Center, University of California Medical Center – Irvine; and University of California – San Francisco. The experience of these institutions is highly positive, although they adopted the hospital medicine model of care to different level and at different time.
The experience can be summarized as follow:
All 5 institutions utilized highly qualified physicians certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine, and some have an additional subspecialty board.
All 5 institutions covered services 7 days a week and 24 h a day.
All institutions reported improvement in quality of inpatient health care and in patient experience.
All 5 institutions reported shorter length of stay by an average of ½ to more than 1 day since implementation of the program.
Different institutions, however, differed in the way they molded the hospital medicine program to their own institutional culture and history.
The conclusion from these visits is that there is no one single formula for the implementation of the hospital medicine program. Each Hospital should adapt the concept to meet the demands of the local situation prevailing and the uniqueness of the country.
