What Is a Hospitalist?
The rise of the hospitalist represents a change in the way you may receive care in a hospital.
In the late 1990s, more and more doctors (mostly internists) began choosing to practice exclusively in hospitals as replacements for primary care physicians.
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History
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A doctor writing for the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996 first used the term "hospitalist." Although there have been doctors practicing exclusively in hospitals since the 1970s, it wasn't until the late 1990s that the specialty began experiencing rapid growth.
Function
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A hospitalist coordinates your treatment with your primary care physician, but he will be the one who cares for you in the hospital in place of your primary care physician.
Interestingly, the number of hospitalists practicing in the United States has grown right along with the spread of managed care. The parallel growth suggests that the two may be connected. -
Managed Care
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Managed care focuses on your primary care physician (PCP) as a "coordinator of care" rather than as a "care giver"--more a manager and less a family doctor. This coordination function requires significant additional time from the PCP, time during which she is in her office and not her examining rooms. In some cases, primary care physicians have had to reduce their patient load (reducing their incomes in the process) to handle the coordinator's responsibilities.
Good managers delegate when they can. The opportunity to delegate hospital activities to hospitalists gives your PCP additional time to handle her normal patient load as well as to deal with the coordination function (talking to your cardiologist about your latest stress test, for example).
Benefits
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As the patient, you also receive benefits from the system.
Since your PCP works in the same community as the hospitalist, the two will know each other. If your PCP doesn't believe the hospitalist will provide you with the same level of care she would, she simply won't use him.
Because the hospitalist works exclusively in the hospital, he can see you more than once a day and spend more time with you when he visits. At other times, he will be no further away than the time it takes to walk across the hospital.
Considerations
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No matter who sees you in the hospital, you should have a list of your medications, allergies, PCP's and specialist's names and phone numbers in your wallet.
Get a discharge summary when you leave the hospital or ER and call your PCP for a follow-up appointment. Take the discharge summary with you when you go to that appointment so your doctor can compare it with the information she has.
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