Many trauma hospitals provide in-house trauma attendings to improve the timeliness of care and to provide housestaff supervision. Frequently, this involves some expense for the hospital. A recent study in the Journal of Trauma examined the financial impact of in-house attendings in an urban Level I trauma center.

Bellevue Hospital in New York City implemented an in-house attending policy in October of 2007. The study looked at the year prior to and the year after implementation. It focused primarily on the number of operative cases performed during nights and on weekends. The biggest changed noted was a four-fold increase in the number of cholecystectomies performed and 1.2 day decrease in the length of stay for those patients.

Using several financial approximations, they concluded that the hospital received an increased revenue of $854K, while the in-house attending program cost the hospital $750K during the year. The study raises a number of questions, though. The average length of stay, even after in-house attending presence, was 5.24 days! It would seem that additional savings could be accrued by working on LOS for these patients, as well as other surgical groups. There were other procedures that were done at night that were not analyzed, so there are probably more benefits to be accrued.

The downside of the in-house attendings performing these acute care surgery cases was that their availability for incoming trauma patients was reduced. There were also questions about the possibility of errors when performing surgery at 4AM.

This study shows evidence that there is a financial benefit to having an in-house surgeon. This will be important to hospital administrators who must grapple with the cost of moving to this type of coverage. However, higher quality financial research of this type is also needed.

Reference: In-house trauma attendings: A new financial benefit for hospitals. Pachter, Simon et al. J Trauma 2010;68(5) 1032-1037.