History

The Cogent HMG Story

The Cogent HMG story began before the term "hospitalist" had even been coined.

In 1993, Dr. Stephen Houff forged the beginnings of a hospitalist service in Columbus, Ohio as a solo inpatient practitioner. In May 2000, a dedicated hospitalist company, Hospitalist Management Group (HMG), was founded and headquartered in Canton, Ohio. With Dr. Houff’s continuous leadership, HMG became one of the premier hospitalist solution providers with over sixty-five programs nationwide.

By embracing hospitalists as equity partners, HMG employed board certified physicians uniquely well suited and career-oriented to their hospital clients’ needs. HMG excelled at designing tailor-made hospitalist programs from the ground up to drive value and operational efficiency with compassionate patient care.

In the mid-1990s, led by Dr. Ron Greeno, several groups of physicians in Southern California began discussing ways to design a hospital medicine program that would create more efficient hospitals, more satisfied patients, and more satisfied primary care and specialty physicians.

With this mission, Cogent Healthcare was founded in 1997 and developed the first generation of comprehensive support for hospitalists called the Cogent HMG System of Care™.  Acknowledged as an industry leader, Cogent was recognized for continually adding value for their hospital partners with a focus on quality enhancement and performance improvement.

In April 2011, Cogent Healthcare and HMG joined to form Cogent HMG, the largest private hospitalist and intensivist management company in the United States. This union brought together two of the strongest companies in the rapidly growing hospital medicine industry, with nearly 1,000 affiliated hospitalists and other providers practicing in more than 100 healthcare facilities across the nation.

Cogent HMG significantly expanded its service offering in critical care medicine with the acquisition of The Intensivist Group (TIG) in August 2011. TIG was the nation’s leading intensivist solution provider with a comprehensive suite of services ranging from critical care consulting, to management services, to fully outsourced intensivist programs. 

Today, the coordination of our clients' hospitalist and intensivist care teams is now a core strength of Cogent HMG and significantly benefits the patient experience, clinical outcomes and financial performance for our hospital partners.