The exchange of information stands to benefit the most important person in the equation: the patient. Hospitalists and primary care providers will each have a unique perspective on the situation, and the details that one clinician can share with another could lead to a solution to a patient’s problem—or even illuminate the fact that there is a problem.
As an example, Allen shares an anecdote about a hospitalist physician who once complained about how patients from an NP-run clinic in rural America were continually returning to his hospital. When asked if he had ever spoken with the NPs, the doctor paused, then admitted he hadn’t. Allen’s viewpoint is that the doctor may have given the patient instructions at discharge that were never passed along to the NPs—or perhaps the NPs knew something about the patient’s life in “the real world” that the hospitalist didn’t.
“Maybe the patient comes to the clinic because he’s poor and doesn’t have any money for meds,” she hypothesizes. “But the hospitalist sent him home on this really expensive antibiotic that he can’t afford to get filled. So he goes to the clinic, and they give him something different, because that’s all he can afford. And it doesn’t work as well.
“So how do we make that work? That’s a huge thing that we tend not to do—communicate with one another. Nine times out of ten, if you sit down and talk, you figure out, ‘Wow, that was a problem from this perspective.’ I mean, the goal of everybody is to give good care.”