What value do hospitalists provide to the physician community?
Thanks to increases in medical technology, more and more care is being delivered in the physician’s office. Today, the average primary care physician has one or two hospitalized patients per week, versus 10-12 patients 20 years ago. Working with a hospitalist provides primary care physicians the ability to focus their attention on their office practices and better refine these needed outpatient skills, while at the same time knowing that their in-hospital patients are receiving the best care possible from specialists trained in that field. This is particularly important because hospitalized patients today are more accutely ill than in the past and require more complex treatments. Because of this, hospital medicine requires a decidedly different skill set than outpatient medicine – a skill set that hospitalists are particularly experienced and competent to handle.
