Musicians On Call

If these aren’t an underappreciated example of so-called value based care, I’m not sure what is. This group of volunteer performers bedside sing to kids with cancer, people at the end of life, those in inpatient mental health facilities, and people in memory care centers.  HCA invested in the non-profit several years ago to help hospitals and other healthcare facilities attract performers and now several insurers are interested in the idea that music can heal or reduce cost.  My 19-year-old musical theater student has started to sing with the group and says it’s uplifting and draining all in one.  “On stage you need the energy of the audience, but bedside you just don’t get that – but it’s there. Maybe a squeeze of your hand or a slight twinge of a smile after you strum the last chord, but it’s there,” Sophie said after a rendition of Carole King’s So Far Away for an older woman whose dementia had taken much of her strength and mind, but not her heart. Bedside singers have become an industry unto themselves, now common in more than 1 in 3 US hospitals.  Nurse Jared Axen once sang to patients at Los Angeles’s Valencia Hospital. His nursing director tells me his patients actually gave the hospital a better satisfaction score even though they are often sicker or deal with more complications, and that they are “3x less likely to be readmitted.” Nurse Brenda Buurstra once sang ‘You Light Up My Life’ to Robert Olsen during the older man’s weeklong stay for breathing issues at Bronson Hospital in Michigan. Despite initial expectations that Robert’s lungs wouldn’t hold up, he was discharged home in a week and hadn’t been admitted back last we checked. Brenda sang to patients before things like readmission penalties and ACOs and social determinants were a thing. “I’ve been singing to patients for 14 years,” she told a CBS TV reporter. “It’s just the first time I got caught.” I showed Sophie these video clips in high school and she heard Brenda singing on key, and Jared moving his patient to tears, so as she struggles to get that lead role on or off Broadway, she put her name on the list to be on call and last summer sang this Wicked song here to a group of families and patients outside a nursing facility in Massachusetts. It’s not lost on me that we are trying to measure value in so many ways these days—in our healthcare businesses, in how we deal with patients, in how we parent, and in ourselves…and for kids like Sophie, she may well be a Bernadette Peters or star as Belle on Broadway someday…but if not, something tells me there’s another leading role waiting for her bedside.