What if one of the most important moments in healthcare happens after a patient leaves the hospital?

In this episode of PEMBA On Demand, Dr. Norman Chapin sits down with Dr. Tiffany Hanf, Regional Medical Director for Post-Acute Care at TeamHealth and current PEMBA student, to discuss one of healthcare’s most persistent and costly challenges: helping patients successfully transition from the hospital to post-acute care while reducing preventable readmissions.

Dr. Hanf oversees post-acute care operations across nine western states and shares insights from her work leading skilled nursing facilities, long-term care facilities, and rehabilitation programs. At the center of the conversation is her work on an acute-to-post-acute transition program designed to improve coordination, communication, and continuity of care between hospitals and post-acute providers.

She explains that one of the biggest barriers to successful transitions is the fragmentation that often exists between hospitals and post-acute facilities. Because these organizations are frequently managed by separate entities, critical information can be lost during the handoff process. Effective discharge summaries, medication coordination, and timely communication are essential to ensuring patients receive seamless care after leaving the hospital.

The discussion explores how the role of physicians in post-acute care has evolved significantly over the years. Dr. Hanf explains that modern post-acute medicine requires dedicated physician leadership, advanced practice clinicians, structured rounding models, and specialty support services. The traditional model of infrequent physician visits to nursing facilities has largely been replaced by a more proactive, team-based approach focused on quality outcomes and reducing unnecessary hospitalizations.

Dr. Hanf also shares lessons from a collaborative initiative with a health system seeking to address long hospital stays, discharge bottlenecks, and readmissions. Through coordinated partnerships and standardized workflows, her team has demonstrated improvements in transitions of care, reductions in readmissions, and shorter hospital lengths of stay. However, she notes that meaningful change often requires overcoming organizational silos and building trust among multiple stakeholders.

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on readmissions from post-acute care settings. Dr. Hanf explains that many readmissions are driven by factors such as infections, sepsis, congestive heart failure exacerbations, falls, inadequate access to diagnostics, staffing challenges, and patient or family decisions to seek emergency care. She emphasizes that successful programs focus on identifying these drivers early and creating systems that allow patients to safely remain in the most appropriate care setting whenever possible.

The episode also highlights TeamHealth’s philosophy that clinicians are the organization’s primary customer. Dr. Hanf discusses how supporting physicians and advanced practice clinicians through strong workflows, technology, communication systems, and leadership ultimately improves facility performance and patient outcomes. This clinician-first approach has become a key part of TeamHealth’s strategy for recruitment, retention, and quality improvement.

Later in the conversation, Dr. Hanf reflects on her own career journey. After spending more than a decade as a hospitalist, she transitioned fully into post-acute care, drawn by the opportunity to build deeper relationships with patients while maintaining a sustainable work-life balance. She describes post-acute medicine as a unique blend of acute care complexity and long-term patient continuity.

Finally, Dr. Hanf shares why she chose to pursue the Physician Executive MBA at this stage of her career. Encouraged by colleagues and mentors, she viewed the program as an opportun...

What if the biggest problem in lung cancer is not treatment, but that patients are diagnosed too late?

In this episode of PEMBA On Demand, Dr. Norman A. Chapin speaks with Dr. J. Robert Headrick, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at CHI Memorial Rees Skillern Cancer Institute, about physician leadership, innovation, and transforming how we approach lung cancer and preventive healthcare.

Dr. Headrick shares how his journey evolved from traditional surgical practice into a mission-driven focus on early detection, access, and system redesign in lung cancer care. He explains that one of the biggest problems in healthcare today is not a lack of treatment options, but the fact that patients are often diagnosed too late, when symptoms finally appear.

The conversation highlights how lung cancer has long been misunderstood as primarily a smoking-related disease, when in reality, many patients, including non-smokers, are affected, and outcomes improve significantly when cancer is detected early.

A central focus of the episode is Dr. Headrick’s work in developing mobile CT screening programs, including a bus-based model designed to bring low-dose CT scans directly into communities. He explains that traditional healthcare delivery creates barriers such as time, access, and inconvenience, which prevent many eligible patients from getting screened. By contrast, simplifying access to a quick, minutes-long scan dramatically increases participation.

Dr. Headrick shares real-world examples of how this approach is changing outcomes, including communities where people are now living with early-stage lung cancer who would not have been diagnosed otherwise. These success stories demonstrate how visibility, convenience, and trust can shift public perception and engagement with preventive care.

The discussion also explores the operational and scalability challenges of this model. While mobile screening improves access, it introduces new complexities such as:

• Managing large volumes of imaging data
• Coordinating follow-up care
• Ensuring patients return for repeat scans
• Avoiding strain on radiology resources

Dr. Headrick explains that these challenges are driving the need for new solutions powered by artificial intelligence, particularly in imaging interpretation and workflow efficiency. AI has the potential to significantly reduce the time required to review scans and help identify early disease patterns more quickly.

A major theme of the episode is the shift from reactive healthcare to proactive care. Dr. Headrick emphasizes that relying on symptoms to guide care is fundamentally flawed, especially for conditions like lung cancer and heart disease, which often remain silent until advanced stages.

He outlines a broader vision for the future of healthcare that includes:

• Earlier and more accessible screening
• Lower-cost, high-efficiency diagnostic tools
• Integration of AI to support clinical decision-making
• Empowering patients to engage in their own health earlier in life

Dr. Headrick also discusses how his experience in the Physician Executive MBA (PEMBA) program helped him transition from thinking as an individual clinician to thinking at a systems level, including business planning, financial modeling, and leadership strategy. This shift enabled him to bring innovative ideas into real-world implementation.

The episode concludes with a powerful perspective on healthcare economics. Dr. Headrick references projections suggesting that moving toward proactive, preventive care could significantly reduce national healthcare spending, while improving patient outcomes and quality of life.

Ultimately, this conversation highlights how physician leadership, combined with innovation and system-level t...

What if hospital-level care could safely happen in a patient’s home instead of inside a hospital building?

In this episode of PEMBA On Demand, Dr. Norman A. Chapin speaks with Dr. Mihir H. Patel about the growing hospital-at-home movement and what it means for physician leaders, health systems, and patients. Hospital at home refers to acute hospital-level care delivered in a patient’s home instead of a traditional inpatient bed, not simply remote monitoring or home health. The model has gained major momentum in recent years as health systems look for new ways to improve capacity, reduce harm, and deliver care in the right setting.

Dr. Patel explains that hospital-at-home programs are designed to address three major challenges in modern healthcare: hospital capacity strain, the risks patients face inside hospitals, and the high cost of brick-and-mortar inpatient care. He walks through the types of diagnoses that often fit the model, including conditions like pneumonia, COPD exacerbations, CHF, cellulitis, UTIs, dehydration, and similar cases where patients need acute treatment but do not require ICU-level care.

The conversation also explores how these programs actually work behind the scenes. Dr. Patel describes the mix of physicians, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, case managers, and logistics teams needed to support care in the home. He and Dr. Chapin discuss how virtual visits, remote monitoring, medication delivery, and rapid-response workflows all play a role in making the model safe and scalable.

A major focus of the episode is outcomes. Dr. Patel shares why mature hospital-at-home programs have shown encouraging results in patient safety, patient satisfaction, and readmissions. Public-facing hospital-at-home resources likewise describe the model as a patient-centered alternative that can improve care outcomes for appropriate adults while reducing exposure to hospital-associated complications.

Dr. Chapin and Dr. Patel also discuss the business and policy side of the model, including fixed versus variable costs, reimbursement, and the importance of federal waiver support. The CMS Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver was extended for five years through 2030 in March 2026, giving health systems more certainty as they invest in infrastructure and staffing. The AMA reports that the waiver supports hospital-level home care for Medicare patients, and advocacy materials from the Advanced Care at Home Coalition show broad national participation by hospitals and health systems.

The episode also highlights the role of technology. Dr. Patel explains how tablets, wireless monitoring devices, ambient AI documentation, and logistics coordination tools are becoming increasingly important in hospital-at-home workflows. He offers a practical look at how these technologies can support earlier intervention, improve efficiency, and help teams manage care across multiple patients and locations.

Later in the conversation, Dr. Patel reflects on his own career path and why he chose to pursue the Physician Executive MBA at the University of Tennessee. He shares how the program helped him think beyond individual patient encounters and better understand finance, operations, workflow design, and system-level leadership. He also discusses his work in medical writing and his involvement with The Hospitalist, which is the Society of Hospital Medicine’s monthly newsmagazine.

This episode is both a practical overview of hospitals at home and a thoughtful reflection on physician fulfillment. Dr. Patel closes with a powerful reminder that success is not only about titles, income, or credentials. For physicians, real success also means finding a path that supports personal well-being, family life, and meaningful patient care.

Key Topics Discussed

• What hospital at home really means
• Why health systems are...