Getting busy physicians who work in hospitals actively involved in their employer’s efforts to improve quality care remains a challenge, reports the Center for Studying Health System Change.

Hospitals will serve as the backbone to any new policies Congress creates in overhauling the health care system. Yet if they intend to deliver quality care and better patients’ outcomes, then the hospital-doctor relationship will have to improve.

“Many physicians are spending less time in hospitals and increasingly are reticent about voluntarily giving their time to hospitals, so finding effective ways to engage physicians in quality improvement is an important challenge for hospitals,” says Dr. Debra A. Draper, HSC associate director and coauthor of the issue brief. “While hospitals are making gains in quality, greater alignment of hospitals and physicians working together on quality improvement would likely spur considerably more improvement,” she adds.

Draper and her team recently issued a report, “Hospital Strategies to Engage Physicians in Quality Improvement,” which explains that hospital doctors may feel less inclined to volunteer time on initiatives to improve quality of care because of their hectic work schedules.  For the report, HSC researchers interviewed hospital executives in Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Seattle to pinpoint strategies to engage physicians in quality improvement efforts.

To build stronger partnerships between hospitals and their doctors on quality-care projects, the report recommends the following:

• Rationalizing the demands placed on hospitals and physicians, focusing on a limited number of quality improvement initiatives that demonstrate the most promise for significant improvement and striving for consistency across programs;
• Creating mechanisms to assist hospitals to use data to improve patient care quality, such as centralized data repositories; and
• Establishing financial and other incentives to support hospital quality improvement and examining state and federal regulations, such as gain sharing prohibitions that may impede hospitals’ engagement of physicians in quality improvement.

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