Why We Are Different
Our Affiliates
We have developed and maintain affiliations with Primary Care Providers and Hospitalists (the inpatient acute care attending physicians) who attend to patients' needs while in the community, and in the hospitals. These physicians do not follow residents in post-acute settings. We follow on their behalf.
Our Physician affiliates depend on us to provide post-acute and long-term care coverage for their patients. They know and appreciate that our qualified clinicians will collaborate with them, and immediately follow their patients when necessary. As a result, their patients are able to be admitted quicker to post- acute settings and receive excellent continuity of care. In addition, the post-acute facilities we work with are better able to care for the more medically complex resident because of our increased coverage.
Our Hospital affiliates are able to discharge their patients quicker and sicker, reduce their lengths of stay, and facilitate quicker placements by their discharge planners/social workers. Also, hospitals do not suffer from non-reimbursed re-admissions under the Medicare DRG system, and/or unnecessary ER visits because we manage the resident's medical needs in the post-acute setting.
As such, General Medicine has become a key source of referrals for selected nursing homes and post-acute facilities. How does this happen? Patients are referred specifically to a General Medicine physician to attend to their post-acute medical needs upon discharge from the hospital. We agree to follow their patients in selected facilities in each area where we provide our services. So, if we are following residents in a specific facility, the facility then will receive referrals from our affiliates. If not, families generally choose another facility in the area where General Medicine physicians and nurse practitioners do follow residents.
Our Leadership and Key Team Members
Another important item to consider about our practice is that several of our key team members are former Administrators, DON's and owners and operators of nursing homes and post-acute facilities as well, so we definitely understand and recognize that managing a facility is a skillful balancing act between providing excellent care and operating a successful business.
We are not your typical nursing home doctors
General Medicine is not your typical physician, or group practice who serves as a post-acute/long-term care doctor or medical director. We do not try to maintain a very busy office and hospital practice, and then fit in visits when we can. We specialize, and only practice in post-acute and long-term settings. Attending to residents in facilities is our only business.
By specializing and concentrating our practice in this way, we are able to provide daily intervention, oversight and follow-up to residents when they need us in the facility, rather than sending them out to the ER, or only visiting them when convenient. Unfortunately in many post-acute and long-term care settings, this may be the typical physician service you have become accustomed to receiving.
We want you to understand that our service is not like that.
Ours can include seven days per week coverage,
if medically necessary !
No Conflict of Interest
It is also very important to note that because we do not follow patients in acute care hospitals, we have no conflict of interest (i.e. we do not attempt to increase our revenues through higher reimbursement by seeing patients in the hospital vs. in a nursing home or other post-acute setting). Typically, nursing home doctors who also follow residents in the hospital cannot say this. They tend to be quicker to send residents out to the ER and re–admit them to the hospital when possible, because it is easier for them to round in the hospital, and much more profitable. This is a wonderful way for them to build their inpatient hospital practice to the detriment of nursing homes and other post-acute facilities. We do not do that. We avoid all unnecessary hospitalizations, and because of this, facilities are able to retain their residents and maintain census.
