Building Bridges: A Guide to Optimizing Physician-Hospital Relationships

Doctors are unhappy. Disenchanted with the practice of medicine, and dissatisfied with personal and professional life, many entertain the notion of alternative careers. Declining reimbursement, increasing workload, diminishing autonomy, and encroaching bureaucracy have robbed medical practice of joy and reduced it to wearisome drudgery. This disturbing trend emerges at a time when physician leadership in hospitals has never been more crucial.

Physician engagement is essential to providing quality care, ensuring patient safety, providing an outstanding experience for patients and families, and building healthy communities. Since doctors and hospitals are inevitably and inextricably bound together in the care of our patients, it is imperative that hospitals help doctors find purpose, meaning, and fulfillment in life while working alongside the hospital to create a healing experience for the suffering and ill who seek our help.

This publication:
• Digs beneath the surface of traditional physician satisfaction concepts to uncover the secrets contributing to deeper physician loyalty
• Describes three indispensable elements that provide a solid foundation for physician-hospital relationships
• Provides a four-step approach to optimizing first impressions when introducing new doctors to the hospital
• Demystifies the concept of wholeness as it applies to patients and physicians
• Provides a simple tool, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, to assess a hospital s approach to the well-being of staff physicians
• Delineates a five-step approach to stimulate thinking about the growing cultural and religious diversity characterizing current-day medical staffs
• Illuminates the peak level of human fulfillment as described by Maslow and its practical application to physicians
• Provides a rich resource of readily transferable templates, tools, and initiatives designed to jump-start efforts to strengthen engagement with doctors
• Provides a provocative glimpse at promising future directions in physician engagement

With a foreword by Harold G. Koenig, MD.

The AdventHealth Healthcare and Leadership Monograph Series is rooted in the intellectual capital of employees at AdventHealth - the largest admitting hospital in America. Monographs in this series provide focused, expert, relevant, and affordable training to interested individuals and organizations on a specific topic. Because of AdventHealth's history, as well as a vast array of business and medical innovations, the monograph series covers topics with a unique whole person health undertone.

Ted Hamilton, MD is Vice President for Medical Mission for Adventist Health System and was previously Senior Medical Officer for Florida Hospital. He graduated from Loma Linda University School of Medicine and did his family practice training at Florida Hospital. Following several years of private practice, he directed the Florida Hospital family practice residency from 1980-87. He obtained his MBA from Rollins College, Crummer School, in 1987. Hamilton directed the Loma Linda University Faculty Practice for two years and has managed care experience with Tennessee Medicaid and Georgia Blue Cross & Blue Shield. He previously chaired the Board of the Orlando Healthcare Center for the Homeless, and is a member of the Board of Shepherds Hope, an outpatient program serving the working poor.