My Journey Through the Beginning of Hospitalist Medicine

Posted @ Thursday, April 26, 2012 2:38 PM By Editor

When I started working as a hospitalist in 1998, there were only a handful of such jobs available in the country. Hospitals were either thinking about starting a hospitalist medicine program or trying to decide if they even needed one. I started working as a hospitalist right out of my residency at Cook County Hospital outside of Chicago (which was an experience in itself). I was full of energy and knowledge, as I had just taken my ABIM boards, and thought I could handle anything. Well, my first few years were very humbling. I found out I had a lot to learn about medicine and life. It was a challenge to try to navigate patients’ end of life issues while figuring out if I really even wanted to be a hospitalist for the next 20+ years.  

I used to get comments from the PCPs that the hospitalist was just a highly paid resident, because if you were a real physician, you would take care of the patients in the clinic as well as when they were in the hospital. Or that a hospitalist was just a temporary phenomenon that would not last. And there was always the comment that hospitalists could not know a patient they were seeing for the first time as well as a PCP who had taken care of the same patient for years.

Recent Developments in the Acute Care Continuum

Posted @ Thursday, April 12, 2012 3:15 PM By Editor

Here are some interesting articles and events related to the Acute Care Continuum:

• Webinar: Achieving ED-Hospitalist Integration - CEP America (4/19/12)
  Emergency physician Jeffrey Bass, MD, and hospitalist physician Denise Brown, MD, will discuss how the relationship between the ED and hospitalists can improve and the subsequent impact that can be felt throughout the hospital. Registration is still open.

• For the Elderly, Emergency Rooms of Their Own – New York Times (4/9/12) 
  Emergency Departments designed exclusively for the elderly are catching on in the New York area.

• Economics Alone Drives Healthcare Reform – HealthLeaders Media (4/3/12) 
  John Commins says that it is not the Supreme Court or patient care that is driving healthcare reform, but rather the financial issues involved.

• Sutter 'navigators' steer routine patients out of emergency rooms – Sacramento Bee (3/23/12) 
  Sutter Health and Effort have created the “emergency department navigator,” a new job within the ED to reduce future traffic by assisting patients with who do not have good prospects for follow-up care.

Please send in your suggestions and we will post them as well.