Hospitalist medicine is the fastest growing medical specialty in history.
Will they having staying power? This piece (via Dr. RW) describes how doctors in the 60’s and 70’s didn’t want to practice in the emergency department, leading to the birth of emergency medicine specialists.
The same is happening now, as primary care doctors are loathe to practice in the hospital. This is even spreading to general surgeons, many of whom are practicing in ambulatory surgery centers and see the hospital as being deluged with “lots of night and weekend work, difficult emergency cases with lots of social and medical co-morbidities, and a poor payer mix.”
So as the “traditionalists,” doctors who practice in both hospital and outpatient settings, become extinct, it’s safe to say that hospitalists and their brethren will be here to stay.
Related posts:
- Are surgical hospitalists here to stay?
- Is the economy giving physicians the upper hand in hospital negotiations?
- My take: Incentives, hospitalists, probabilities
- Specialists and zebras
- Should hospitalists or intensivists manage ICU patients?
- Hospitals are closing
- Are emergency physicians best served to staff urgent care centers?
{ 1 comment }
Wrong, wrong, wrong, at least as far as my community goes.
The majority of internists and family physicians up my way have chosen to not give up hospital practice, forcing the hospitals to play “hardball” so that their subsidized hospitalists get utilized, such as forcing all admissions to be seen within 2 hours.
Young family physicians are being told they cannot do both in patient and outpatient work, much like family physicians of prior eras were told they could not/should not deliver babies, do er work, ICU work, surgical procedures, fracture care, etc, etc, etc. They are missing out on one of the most rewarding parts of practice.
I think primary care doctors will regret the day they gave up hospital medicine; it just makes them more easily replaced by midlevels.
By the way, hospitalists in my neighborhood stin. God forbid they should ever try to communicate with the PCP.
A family practitioner
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