Physician – Hospitalist Program Medical Director (Internal Medicine) – Beautiful Montana Full-Time NEW

The Medical Director of the Benefis Hospitalist Department provides overall medical leadership in collaboration with department management, including establishing patient care standards, overseeing the implementation and evaluation of departmental services, and guiding performance in quality, patient experience, education, and provider accountability for a department with approximately 30 FTEs working in a tertiary trauma, not for profit health system with 500 licensed beds. This role partners with Benefis leadership to develop and monitor program goals aligned with organizational priorities, fosters collaborative relationships with medical staff and diagnostic and therapeutic departments to ensure high-quality and efficient care delivery, and contributes to departmental budget planning.

Qualifications

• Career physician with proven clinical and administrative skills.
• Board certified in Internal Medicine
• Demonstrated ability to speak effectively on administrative and clinical matters related to hospital medicine.

Responsibilities

• To provide leadership, planning, organization, staffing, coordination, and evaluation for hospitalist department provider activities.
• Is responsible for medical staff administration, personnel, and activities in the hospitalist department.
• Provide physician oversight of Advanced Practice Clinicians, as assigned by the Office of the Chief Medical Officers, in accordance with the Advanced Practice Clinician Quality Assurance Physician Oversight Requirements Policy.
• Has the responsibility for ensuring the ethical practice of hospitalist medicine within the hospitalist department.
• Directly supervises and has responsibility for hospitalist physicians/providers in clinical and assigned administrative duties to include scheduling.
• Responsibility to provide mentorship and growth of associate medical staff leadership roles within the hospitalist department.
• Acts as a liaison with hospital administration and medical staff.
• Promotes and participates in a collaborative, interdisciplinary Hospitalist leadership team.
• Collaborates with Hospitalist leadership team to ensure that departmental performance meets or exceeds standards described in medical staff rules and regulations, hospital bylaws, departmental policies, CMS and other appropriate local and national standards.
• Works with Hospitalist leadership team to ensure that the department meets or exceeds its defined objectives for improvement, growth and expansion of services.
• Ensures departmental policies are known, understood, and implemented by the hospitalist department physicians/providers.
• Monitors correctness and appropriateness of the hospitalist department records; implements corrective intervention as required in association with medical records and quality assurance mechanisms.
• Is available for counseling, advice, information, and general support to the physicians/providers and other department members.
• Hold regular documented meetings (at least monthly) with providers to discuss systems, patient flow, quality improvement initiatives, scheduling and patient experience.
• Works with Hospitalist leadership to develop an annual budget, including staffing, equipment and supplies.
• With Hospitalist leadership, monitors the revenue cycle providing input for coding, charge capture, and billing processes.

Education

• Requires participation and initiation of in-service continuing education of physicians/providers and residents
• Encourages the involvement of all physician staff to participate in departmental staff meetings/training/education/teaching
• Collaborates with Internal Medicine Residency Program leadership

Liaison 

• The Medical Director shall ensure the Hospitalist Department has effective communications with the following individuals and groups:Patients and their families
• Hospital administration/department heads
• Nursing leadership
• Medical Staff, to include, but not limited to:Physician interface
• Review of complaints and amicable resolution
• Openness to suggestions from medical staff
• Timeliness of medical staff response to consultation

Community/Regional Relations

• Available to the hospital community relations department to provide appropriate media communication as related to hospitalist services.
• Provide follow-up on any issues with physicians in the region.
• May make periodic site visits to location within the region.

Recruitment/Orientation

• Participates in identifying and recruiting hospitalist physicians/providers.
• Designs a formal orientation process for new department members.

Department/Hospital Committee Meetings

• Schedules and attends monthly departmental meetings.
• Acts as the Hospitalist Department liaison to hospital medical staff executive committee.
• Assures hospitalist department representation on all appropriate committees; e.g. Readmissions, etc.
• Attends BMG Board of Director’s quarterly meetings.

Quality Assurance

• In collaboration with the Hospitalist Leadership team, Risk Management and Quality and Safety departments, establishes, implements, and maintains the Quality and Safety/Risk Management initiatives.
• With Hospital leadership, review, investigate, manage and report all complaints arising from patients, family, medical staff, hospital staff and others.
• Collaborates with the Hospitalist Leadership Team to ensure rules are followed; e.g., CMS standards, medical staff bylaws, policies and procedures, etc.
• Follows the hospital specific reporting structure for all QA activities.
• Assists Hospitalist Leadership and department team in meeting goals for Patient Experience Scores, to include, but not limited to:
• Weekly review of Hospitalist Departmental Patient Experience Scores with Hospitalist Leadership team.
• Establish Hospitalist physician/provider Patient Experience Goals and Action Plans to monitor compliance.
• Weekly reviews physician/provider scores and comments with follow up to physician/provider of recognition/opportunities.

Peer Reviews

• Provides timely audits of charts for completeness and content.
• Reviews adverse outcomes or risk management cases as pertains to the Hospitalist department.
• Advocates due process for complaint resolution and other issues relating to the Hospitalist medical staff.

Planning

• Participates in long-range planning for facility design or modification, equipment acquisition, and new services.
• Monitors advances in Hospital Medicine and recommends change as needed to ensure that Hospitalist services and capabilities are dynamic and progressive; e.g., through-put, door to floor, geographic rounding, doc to doc communication, etc.
• Works with the Hospitalist Leadership team, as requested, to plan and manage the change process.

Compensation and Benefits

• Nationally competitive shift-based compensation structures with additional performance bonuses
• Generous sign-on / relocation bonus
• Annual $5,000 CME + $1,000 license/dues
• 5-7% retirement match + 457b program
• Paid malpractice + tail
• Physician wellness programs focused on personal and professional development
• Monthly meetings with highest-level physician and administrative leadership to bring ideas forward and solve issues
• J1 waiver sponsorships for specific specialties with established immigration council

Why we stand out 

• Stand alone, financially stable, not-for-profit health system led by a CEO with a 20+ year tenure
• Over 440 employed providers on medical staff
• Regional tertiary center with robust specialty support including neurosurgery, pulmonology, neurology, endocrinology, rheumatology, advanced gastroenterology, cardiothoracic, and more!
• Patient focused, quality community and regional medical care
• Epic electronic medical record and good clinical support staffing structures

Community Information: Great Falls is known as Montana’s base camp for art and adventure with a city population of 70,000, and a draw of over 275,000 people in north central Montana. We have four genuine seasons, experience mild winters and enjoy blue skies over 300 days per year. Great Falls is a wonderful and safe place to raise a family, with nationally ranked public schools, endless activities, two accredited colleges, a brand-new nursing school, a biomedical rural health research institute, and a new not-for-profit medical school, TouroCOM Montana. Additionally, the Missouri River, a blue-ribbon fly-fishing destination, runs through the middle of our community with over 60 miles of paved recreational trails. Our local outdoor activities include camping, backpacking, hiking, biking, horseback riding, water and snow skiing, rock and ice climbing, boating, paddle boarding, kayaking, off-road motor sports, and hunting making our quality of life unrivaled in the Rocky Mountain West. Additionally, 2023-2026, Montana was named #1 state in the nation to practice medicine by WalletHub and in 2020, Great Falls ranked #10 for best cities to practice in after the pandemic by Business Insider.

Benefis Health System is one of Montana’s largest tertiary centers holding a level II trauma designation.  We are proud to be a standalone, financially stable community health system with strong, dedicated leadership focused on providing the best patient care in Montana, in addition to being awarded Becker’s “Best Places To Work in Healthcare” for 7 years.  Benefis covers ¼ of the state’s land mass, an area comparable in size to Kansas and can provide advanced care for everything except for burns and organ transplants. We offer great specialty support including neurosurgery, cardiothoracic and vascular, advanced gastroenterology, a regional cancer institute and a state-of-the-art emergency trauma department with a dedicated air ambulance program, including fixed and rotor wing.

Visit our website  https://www.benefis.org  for more information

Submit your CV today to learn more, [email protected] or [email protected]

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