Hospitalists, a new species of primary care physicians (Ruthann Russo)

Hospitalists are physicians whose main focus is the general medical care of hospitalized patients. The term hospitalist was coined in 1996, so it is a relatively new focus for primary care physicians. The hospitalist concept works like this. You become ill and your primary care physician determines that you need to be admitted to the hospital. If your physician admits to a hospital that employs hospitalists, he may have the option (or in some cases be required) to hand over your care to one of the hospitalists until you are discharged.

Hospitalists became a popular concept on the west coast in the 1990s and gradually moved east. For the patient, the thinking is that because the hospitalist was employed by the hospital and was an “insider” so to speak, they could work the system better and the patient would end up with the most efficient and highest quality of care possible. For the hospital, it gave the organization more control over use of resources and hopefully, the numbers of patients being admitted so it would result in an economic win for them. For the primary care physician, the appeal is that the physician could focus all of his attention on patients coming to the office, their time could be managed more efficiently and the use of hospitalists to care for their patients who were admitted to the hospital was an economic win for the physician. Because it is such a new profession, the jury is still out on how patients feel about being seen by hospitalists instead of their personal physicians.

Because hospitalists spend most or all of their work day in the hospital, they are more readily available to a patient than a doctor who spends most of his day outside the hospital in an office or clinic setting. Because of their expertise in hospital care, hospitalists are able to recognize and diagnose unusual disorders, anticipate problems and rapidly respond to crises or changes in a patient's condition.