IPC signs agreement with UCSF to develop leadership training program for physician managers

IPC The Hospitalist Company, Inc. (Nasdaq: IPCM), a leading national hospitalist physician group practice company, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Division of Hospital Medicine and its Center for the Health Professions to develop a leadership training program for dozens of IPC's key physician managers. Graduates of this fellowship program, the first of its kind in hospital medicine, will be equipped with the skills to lead change, both within and outside their organization – a skill set that is essential to meeting healthcare's challenges in an era of reform and breathtaking change.

Adam Singer, MD, Chairman and CEO of IPC The Hospitalist Company, commented, "This partnership with one of the nation's leading academic programs in hospital medicine puts IPC squarely in the forefront of clinical leadership education for hospitalists. Training is the key to creating true alignment between physicians and hospitals, and together with our UCSF partners, we have developed the best leadership training program available to hospitalist leaders. This endeavor is very much in keeping with an entrepreneurial spirit that gives an outsourced practice solution such as IPC a competitive edge in providing leadership to the hospital community in the field of hospital medicine."

In the first phase of the program, IPC will enroll approximately 40 clinical leaders in the Fellowship program. The enrollees will participate in a variety of learning modalities, including core program seminars, executive coaching sessions, webinars and on-site meetings. In addition to learning core leadership skills, participants will also receive training in quality improvement and patient safety. An important feature of the program is the Quality/Operational Improvement Project. Enrollees will select a key area in their own hospital, and, working with UCSF program mentors, develop and implement a plan to improve it, with measurable results.

Robert Wachter, MD, who coined the term 'hospitalist' in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996 and is the Chief of UCSF's Division of Hospital Medicine, added, "We must find ways to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of hospital care and to improve transitions of care. This partnership will help build a cadre of physician-leaders who can do just that. IPC employs more than 1000 hospitalists at hundreds of hospitals around the U.S., so the impact of this program will be vast. Creating a true collaboration between a private hospitalist enterprise and our academic programs is an exciting and inspiring challenge, and we at UCSF are totally committed to its success." Wachter co-directs the training program, along with fellow UCSF hospitalists Arpana Vidyarthi and Niraj Sehgal, and Ed O'Neil, director of the UCSF Center for the Health Professions and an internationally respected figure in healthcare leadership training.