Critical care alignment: Bridging ICU practices and hospital goals

By: Hesham Hassaballa, MD, FCCP, FAASM | Associate Regional Medical Director – Critical Care   

The hospital business is tough, especially in the aftermath of a global pandemic. Costs continue to inflate in the healthcare sector, especially clinician labor costs. Simultaneously, government and commercial payer reimbursements are not just failing to keep up with inflation but actively decreasing, creating a profoundly unsustainable financial situation.   

In this uncertain environment, it’s of the utmost importance that hospitals choose partners who understand the business of running a hospital and are dedicated to seeing eye-to-eye with hospital leaders and their strategic goals.  

It’s no secret that critical care medicine is not a main revenue generator for most hospitals. At the same time, almost every hospital needs an intensive care unit (ICU), as it’s the only place in a hospital where the sickest patients can get life-saving care. Patients and families alike prefer to stay close to home if they become critically ill, and a local hospital’s ICU can facilitate that.  

Moreover, an ICU is essential to the work of teams in areas like cardiovascular surgery, neurosurgery, and vascular surgery — all-important specialties that generate a larger percentage of a hospital’s revenue. If a hospital can have a world-class, functioning ICU where the latest evidence-based practice is implemented daily, surgical specialties can thrive.   

Enter Sound Critical Care   

One of the fundamental pillars of our critical care practice is continuous, ongoing communication with our hospital partners. From the first moment we partner with a hospital, we engage its leadership and discuss where pain points are and how we can strategically help them. Their goals become our goals. The outcomes they care about most become the outcomes we care about most. Whether it’s decreasing the overall length of stay or eliminating penalties to increase government reimbursement, Sound brings tested strategies to the table for improving the quality of care.  

An excellent example of this partnership is our critical care practice at Jefferson Einstein Montgomery Hospital in Pennsylvania, led by Critical Care Medical Director Dr. Jaber Monla-Hassan. He implemented a quality improvement project focused on better educating patients about medication side effects before discharge. The result? Zero readmissions due to medication side effects for over three years. In addition, patient experience scores related to medication understanding rose sharply and significantly, surpassing the national average. This incredible improvement to patient care had the added benefit of hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for the hospital.   

This is what Sound Critical Care does for hospitals across the country; we bring value to our hospital partners in this financially challenging time to help them not just survive but thrive and succeed. It may be a tough time to run a hospital, but our mission to bring better to the bedside through clinical leadership, innovation, and culture in every community we serve persists no matter the healthcare landscape.  

If you’re interested in what we can bring to your hospital, learn more here.