One of the least motivating requests I received routinely as a new intern was something like, “… and can we make sure this is a discharge before noon?” I recall a particularly eager nursing manager surveying the resident teams on her unit to gauge our interest in arriving even earlier each morning (5 a.m., perhaps?) in order to prepare potential discharges before pre-rounding. We shared a nice laugh.

Administrators vs. house staff

Hospital administrators and medical interns share many passions, but throughput is not one of them. As residents, we are immersed in caring for, and learning to care for, the patient at hand. Patient flow dynamics is not high on our daily list of concerns. Residents and leadership have not always seen eye to eye, but the discord has ratcheted up in an era increasingly focused on metrics. As with most issues in our convoluted health care system, it boils down to misaligned incentives.

When you map out the Venn diagram of what administrators and residents prioritize, high-quality patient care sits squarely in the overlapping center. Outside that, however, are things like throughput and average length of stay on the one side, and sitting down to teach the med student or getting home in time to go to the gym on the other. That isn’t to say that either side doesn’t care about the other’s issues, but, for better or for worse, it’s not what drives their day-to-day decision making. 

Metrics, of course, come in a variety of flavors. There are some where the goal is universally agreed upon, whereas the methods are only variably so. Everyone wants to reduce rates of hospital-acquired C. diff infection, and basic methods of preventing transmission jive with common sense. Reducing diagnosis by means of judicious testing is backed by good evidence, but friction can arise between leadership and front line providers when this becomes an end in and of itself, and the patient in front of us becomes a potential statistic.

Other metrics are less intuitive to residents. Discharges before noon (DBNs) are a perfect case study. Theories abound as to the benefits of DBN for patients (e.g., getting home during the day, ability to pick up meds at pharmacies), but there is no compelling literature demonstrating any of this. This is not lost on residents. One could similarly posit downsides to incentivizing early discharges (holding patients to meet metrics, hurried coordination of services, and appointments).

More important are the contradictory incentives at play. Hospital leadership views each DBN through the lens of throughput. The earlier a patient goes home, the earlier a bed opens up, and the sooner a new patient gets a room. It (questionably) decompresses the ED, and boosts the bottom line. From the resident perspective, in many circumstances, an earlier discharge increases the likelihood of another admission. The reward for working hard to get the patient out early is … more work.

Solutions?

The solution should be obvious. If the hospital’s motivation is financial, then they should pass that incentive along to the residents. Not in the form of pizza parties, but as cold, hard greenbacks. This is how attendings and nurse managers are motivated in many institutions. There is hesitation, it seems, to tie bonuses to residents’ productivity. Despite improvements in resident salaries, we remain underpaid in terms of hourly wages, and there is no calculation of RVUs or talk of overtime pay. Debates over residents’ legal status notwithstanding, we are influenced by the same basic motivations as every other employee.

This same logic exercise can be applied to just about every point of contention between administrators and house staff. If leadership wants to understand how to get its front-line providers to buy into a particular metric or initiative, they should take an honest look at their own motivations. If it is purely about improving the quality of patient care, then they need only demonstrate that convincingly. If it is driven in any way by profit — which, by the way, is part of the business of medicine — then they should pass it along. Human nature is not to do more work for the same amount of money.

Residents can, similarly, do more to view the world through the lens of the administrator. Leadership is above the treetops, surveying the forest, whereas we are deep in it, hugging a few of the trees. It may mean taking a broader view of the health of a population and of the institution. But until we take the time to view the world from each other’s vantage point, friction and frustration will persist.

Eric Bressman is an internal medicine chief resident who blogs at Insights on Residency Training, a part of NEJM Journal Watch.

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