Hospital Medicine

Our purpose

Bringing better inpatient care to patients in every community we serve.

Our practice

Our hospital medicine practice is rooted in strong clinical leadership and excellence and empowered teams. We’re physicians, advanced practice providers, and nurses committed to understanding the unique needs of our patients.

We foster a leadership mentality at all levels within our hospital medicine teams, and we’re natural collaborators across hospital departments and between our own programs. We’ve found that our integrated programs — working with one of our critical care or emergency medicine teams in the same place — yield even greater satisfaction among our patients. Whether we’re working on a straightforward or complex case, we take time to listen and understand so we can develop the right approach for care. And we embrace autonomy at the local level, with the flexibility to practice in ways that benefit the communities we serve.

Our promise is to bring better to the bedside. Better ideas, better approaches, better care. Whether we’re rounding with hospital teams, evaluating patients, or sending them to the most appropriate next site of care, our patients are at the center of everything we do and inspire us to be better every day.

Gregory Johnson, MD, SFHM 1

What our leaders say

“We equip our clinical leaders with the skills to inspire and manage a high-performing team. Our medical directors work to change the mindset in every clinician that our care isn’t just about the encounter that’s right in front of us, but about our role in the entire patient episode.”

Gregory Johnson, MD, SFHM

Chief Executive Officer, Hospital Medicine and Chief Diversity Officer

Our performance

We continuously calibrate our approach to stay in lockstep with each other and our partners — from understanding the problem to implementing worthwhile, lasting solutions. With our depth of experience, we’re able to anticipate challenges and engage our team’s full complement of skills. Our clinical performance nurses work closely with our medical directors to improve processes, track performance, and ensure everyone is in the loop and aligned. We also have physician advisors who can expertly sift through the nuances of payer rules to ensure cases are documented and coded correctly, resulting in fewer denials, improved length of stay, and accurate reimbursement.

Our teams are built to be better at what we do, which makes for a better partner and patient experience.

Here’s some of what to expect within the first year*:

  • 11 percent decrease in length of stay
  • 13 percent increase in case mix index
  • 21 percent decrease in readmissions
  • 35 percent increase in discharges by 10:00 a.m.
  • 4 percent increase in HCAHPS top-box scores

*Mean improvements across all new sites launched between January 2019 and June 2022.

How we do it:

  • Expert clinical and operational process design
  • Clinical performance nurses who ensure consistency of care, manage process improvement, and open communication to align on care
  • Physician advisors who navigate the ins and outs of documentation and coding to improve patient status and flow
  • SoundConnect and SoundMetrix in-house platforms that track length of stay, observation management, patient experience, readmissions, and throughput
    • This in-house technology brings data to the point of decision-making and offers transparency and accountability through consistent data sharing

Our people

What matters to us is caring for patients — and having a team that shares our values and conviction to be better. This is reflected in how we work, every day — with mutual respect, trust, and a genuine spirit of collaboration. Here, every voice matters, and every insight helps us grow as clinicians and humans.

We enjoy the best of both worlds — the ability to practice hospital medicine at the community level while drawing on the collective wisdom of our national presence. We embrace autonomy within our practice and have a path to professional growth — along with the development tools and resources to help us get there. We champion diversity, equity, and inclusion at all levels. And we benefit from deeply engaged leaders who care as much about patients as we do.

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Our partners

We partner across the country with hospitals and health systems.

Let’s talk about building a partnership. We’d love to connect.

FAQs

Why should I transform my hospital with a team from Sound Physicians?

For starters, we know what we’re doing. We do things that hospitals don’t do as well, and we do them better than anyone. First, we nail the compulsories. We staff extraordinarily well and hold onto 90% of incumbents because we treat our clinicians with respect and promote camaraderie. In short, we let doctors be doctors, and they love working for us. (Many win “Physician of the Year” awards.) Second, our teams demonstrate an entrepreneurial (some would say insurgent) spirit that is one of the hallmarks of Sound’s culture. We are not a set it and forget it organization. Everything we do is about ensuring patients get what they need and want from a hospital stay. We understand it, measure it, manage to it, and problem-solve around it to get better all the time.

How do you communicate with our community physicians and our subspecialists to deliver differentiated care?

We understand better than anyone the linkage between specialties. For instance, if you’re like most hospitals, 75% of your revenue comes from surgical procedures, not from medicine patients. That’s why we stand up perioperative testing centers to provide better service to both your patients and your surgeons, reduce cancellations, and enhance financial performance.  In short, we make your concerns our concerns, and find creative ways to solve them.

Will your nationwide footprint distract you from working to understand and care about my hospital?

On the contrary, our coast-to-coast perspective gives us a unique window into healthcare in America and what works and what doesn’t. We bring the collective knowledge of 400 medical directors from across the country to ensure you and your community have the latest in clinical excellence. Best practices are shared throughout our family of physicians in real-time, whether it’s how to reduce length of stay, decrease door-to-provider times in the ED, or administer a complex cocktail of medications during a pandemic.

Given how different hospitals are from one another, how do you show engagement and alignment?

Through the stability of our hospital medicine teams. Our conversion rate of incumbent physicians is more than 90%, and our turnover rate is under 15% — better than the national average and the lowest in Sound history. Our integrated approach means we collaborate across teams—surgical, hospital medicine, critical care–whether we manage them or not.  We find clinician satisfaction and patient experience scores greatly improve as a result.

How do you solve high physician burnout?

First, we let doctors be doctors. Then we create the time and space for our clinicians to grasp the “why” behind decisions. Mandating a busy physician to do something without sufficient context simply doesn’t work. We monitor clinician well-being through evidence-based practices to maintain stable and strong clinical teams.

Every hospital is different. How will you embrace what is unique about my institution and community and adapt accordingly?

At every site, we work with existing physicians who have either shown dedication to the community, or we bring in talented clinicians who demonstrate a strong desire to be in a location. In El Paso, for instance, 90% of our doctors speak Spanish because that’s a requirement to be successful there. Many of our most talented and compassionate clinicians elect to work with our critical access partners in rural parts of the country where they develop multiple skills.