Milliman Care Guidelines honors Sound Physicians with prestigious award

Sound Physicians, a leading hospitalist organization focused on driving improvements in quality, satisfaction and efficiency of inpatient healthcare delivery, today received the Doyle Award for Innovation and Leadership in Healthcare.

Sound Physicians received the prestigious award from Milliman Care Guidelines LLC, a Milliman Company, at its April 5 Client Forum.

Sound Physicians, a national hospitalist service organization, won the Doyle Award in the healthcare provider category. With approximately 500 physicians working at more than 45 hospitals around the country, Sound Physicians uses the Care Guidelines as a key component to support its High-Impact Diagnoses Initiative.

The High-Impact Diagnoses Initiative uses evidence-based, best-practice guidelines at the bedside for patients with diagnoses where quality, cost and volume intersect, such as pneumonia, sepsis, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and stroke.

The Care Guidelines-backed High-Impact Diagnoses Initiative has improved quality, decreased hospital length of stay, reduced direct cost per case, reduced practice variability, and improved the accuracy of clinical documentation for targeted diagnoses, all leading to improved quality, financial performance and clinical efficiency.

"Our High-Impact Diagnoses Initiative helps us deliver measurable value to the patient care at our hospital partner sites," said Robert Bessler, M.D., founder and CEO of Sound Physicians. "Through clinical process excellence, we drive continuous performance improvement to the quality and efficiency of patient care."

Sound Physicians' High-Impact Diagnosis Initiative, which has helped the organization's hospitalists improve the delivery of evidence-based, best-practice care, enables the integration of pharmacy, clinical documentation and discharge facilitation interventions at the patient's bedside daily. With nearly half of its hospital partners opting to resource this initiative, Sound Physician's centralized, lean-certified Clinical Operations Team continues to refine the initiative to drive additional value for its hospital partners.

Marina Farah, M.D., M.H.A., Medical Director of Clinical Operations, and Kristi Frantz, M.S.S., Senior Director of Clinical Operations, accepted the award for Sound Physicians at the April 5 event.