Inpatient Medicine Service
Hospital Medicine provides team based care to general medicine and subspecialty overflow patients at both University Hospital and UAB Highlands. We have 7 dedicated Hospital Medicine acute care units that are staffed with a combination of MD-Clinical Care Coordinator (CCC) and MD-APP collaborative teams. Our hospitalists are also strategically embedded in other clinical services to provide proactive medical management for complex patients, partnerships that we call “Integrated Practice Models”. You can find our hospitalists working in tandem with Neurology, Cardiology, Geriatric Psychiatry, and Physical Medicine and Rehab. Beginning August 2021 we will also have dedicated Infectious Disease hospitalists providing ID care to hospital medicine patients across University Hospital. A large proportion of our patients suffer from infectious processes and this venture allows us to provide earlier subspecialty engagement to those who need it most.
Procedure Service
The UAB Procedure Service was developed in August 2014 with funding from an HSF-GEF grant to provide safe, efficient, timely bedside procedures including ultrasound guided central venous line (CVL) placement, paracentesis, thoracentesis, and lumbar puncture. All attending physicians and procedure clinical care coordinators (CCC) have undergone standardized simulation training in each procedure, having demonstrated proficiency in the simulation setting prior to performing procedures on patients. As a result of our standardized approach both to training and performing procedures in the clinical setting the service boasts an impressively high (93%) success rate and equally impressively low (0.2%) complication rate for procedures performed. The service and its attendings have become institutional leaders in bedside procedures, specifically central access, and as a result the service is consulted by all services and service lines across the institution. In response to institutional improvements in CVL credentialing standards and increased consult requests the service has expanded to include expertly trained Advance Practice Providers (APPs) to both perform and supervise trainees in CVL placement at the bedside, a venture that will help reduce unnecessary CVL related complications.
General Medicine Consults
Our General Medicine Consult Service is available 7am-5pm, 7 days a week for non-urgent general medicine consults and 24/7 for urgent general medicine and preoperative assessment consults. Staffed by a consult physician and APP the team works collaboratively to see both new consult requests and to provide follow up for existing consults. We understand that consultant recommendations are critical to patient care progression, so we set a service-wide goal to provide final, attending recommendations within 4 hours of consult. We track our response times and continue to make workflow adjustments as needed to help us meet our goal.
