Rice says that neither he nor his colleagues would ever go back.

After having worked shifts for less than a year, Dr. “With lower patient volumes, that was the only model that was economically viable.”Ĭonsult our collection of Scheduling/Workload StrategiesĪs the daily census ballooned above 80 patients, however, the program made the switch last summer to 24/7 coverage with shift-based scheduling. Starting with three physicians, Eric Rice, MD, the group’s medical director, and his colleagues worked a call-based schedule, with one physician on call for 24 hours as “the hospitalist of the day,” Dr.

In the four years since it was founded, the hospitalist program at Methodist Hospital in Omaha, Neb., has followed a fairly typical evolution in how it schedules physicians.