Hospital Medicine: The Past
Hospital medicine is the fastest-growing specialty in American medical history and now boasts more than 50,000 “hospitalists” — a term coined by Drs. Robert Watcher and Lee Goldman, in 1996, to refer to physicians who focused primarily on general inpatient care.
At 20 years of age, hospital medicine is still quite young in comparison to other specialties, such as internal medicine, which is more than 100 years old.
Over the past two decades, hospital medicine, a discipline that was frowned upon at the outset, with doctors being considered no more highly skilled than residents, has transformed itself into an indispensable part of the hospital’s patient care and management team.
The reasons for the growth and transformation are two-fold:
The drive for efficiency and need to demonstrate high-quality outcomes, particularly in an era where health care reform is rapidly changing the reimbursement model to one no longer based on quantity but quality (value-based outcomes).
The need to manage inpatient care more effectively than was possible with primary care physicians, who were forced to manage both outpatient and inpatient care. With the advent of hospital medicine, PCPs and internists could remain in their offices and leave time-consuming inpatient care in the hands of dedicated hospitalists. Click here to continue >>
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