Denver Health is a level one trauma center providing integrated
primary and acute care to 25% of the residents of
Denver County. The Denver Health system consists of a main hospital, with
nearly 500 licensed beds, and 8 outlying community clinics. Denver Health is a nationally renowned model for “safety net” hospital systems
with its unique integration of inpatient, urgent care, and outpatient
facilities with shared diagnostic facilities and medical record. The hospital
offers newly renovated ward floors, a recently constructed ICU, an electronic
medical record system, and state of the art computerized physician order entry.
Denver Health serves a diverse patient population, with a spectrum
of indigent to fully insured patients. Additionally, there is a large
Spanish-speaking population. Residents and interns in internal medicine, as
well as interns in other departments care for patients with basic medical
problems, unusual and rare diagnoses, and advanced presentations of all
illnesses. In addition to the large teaching service, Denver Health has grown
its hospitalist division from 6 physicians to over 20 in the past five years.
These non-teaching teams off-load patients from the resident-run services
protecting their service-to-education ratios.
The general medicine ward service includes eight upper-level
residents and eight interns working in a day/night shift system with geographic
patient assignments. Each team has three weeks of day shifts and one week of
night shifts. The shift system affords interns substantial autonomy, while
maintaining 24/7 backup from upper level residents and in-house hospitalists.
The teaching services, built upon geographic rounding, utilize an
interprofessional rounding model with intimate involvement with all disciplines
including nursing, social work, therapy, and pharmacy.
Finally, there is a closed CCU/MICU staffed by teams of one third-year
resident and one intern. These services
are supervised by both a cardiologist and an intensivist, with fellows of the
respective services also closely involved in teaching and patient care. The ICU
teams rotate in a traditional q4 call cycle. The ICU cares for many patients
presenting with sepsis, complications of drug and alcohol abuse, and esoteric
problems in critical care. The MICU team
is heavily involved in multiple ongoing research trials and is an active member
of the ARDS Network of academic healthcare centers.
Denver Health Medical Center