Mercy Internal Medicine Service Celebrates 20 Years

SPRINGFIELD — The Mercy Internal Medicine Service (MIMS), one of the first hospitalist programs in the country to provide an in-house doctor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

MIMS was founded at Mercy Medical Center in July 1993, three years before the term ‘hospitalist’ was formally coined in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article.

“Since its founding, MIMS has continuously been an innovator in the delivery of high-quality hospital care,” said Dr. Simon Ahtaridis, medical director of MIMS. “In addition to achieving outstanding clinical outcomes, we have also successfully implemented such advances as the Care Link electronic medical record and our most recent care-management program, known as CareConnect.”

Hospital medicine, one of the fastest-growing fields in medicine, is a fairly new specialty in which doctors referred to as hospitalists focus entirely on providing high-quality, comprehensive care to patients admitted to hospitals. Currently, there are more than 34,000 hospitalists practicing in more than 3,000 hospitals across the U.S. Published studies show that hospitals that employ hospitalists often have higher patient satisfaction, improved quality of care, reduced risk of unplanned readmissions, and more coordinated and efficient care.

“MIMS is an example of Mercy’s distinct commitment to providing the very best care possible and the very best patient experience,” said Daniel Moen, president and CEO of the Sisters of Providence Health System. “The MIMS physicians and clinical staff have played an integral role in Mercy’s designation as a Top 100 Value hospital for the past four consecutive years.”

MIMS celebrated its 20th anniversary recently at the Federal in Agawam with a reunion of former and current MIMS providers, medical directors, and administrative founders who first developed the MIMS hospitalist model.