Hospitalists, the fastest-growing medical specialty in the country, are doctors (typically internists) who care for patients while they are in the hospital. Not before. Not after. Just during their hospital stay. Until recently, most primary care doctors cared for their patients both in and out of the hospital, but with the emergence of hospitalists, hospital medicine has morphed into a calling all its own. In 1997, there were around 1,000 hospitalists in the United States. Today, there are 20,000 — a number that is expected to climb to 30,000 by 2010. Practiced in scattered locations for a number of years, the concept caught fire in the mid-1990s when the changing dynamics of health care created a need for new strategies. That’s also when the term hospitalist was coined in a New England Journal of Medicine article. Of course, there would not be this explosive growth of hospitalists if it did not make financial sense. While hospitalists cannot point to any studies that quantify the financial carrots, it’s easy to see where savings can occur. It starts with the time hospitalists save primary care doctors by sparing them repeated trips to the hospital to make rounds. In the past, those trips — as many as three a day — made more sense as primary care doctors tended to admit more of their patients to the hospital. Today’s emphasis on preventive medicine and reliance on outpatient treatment has changed that. A primary care doctor might be managing only one or two hospital cases at any given time.
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Posted by citronlegal 
