Physicians Practice - September 2008 - (Page 91) CME IN PRACTICE YOUR HOSPITALIST AND YOU BY BOB REDLING, MS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE HOTTEST NEW SPECIALTY IN MEDICINE You won’t find a bigger fan of hospitalists than Peter Anderson. The Newport News, Va., family physician did rounds for 10 years before he signed up to refer his patients to physicians who handle only hospital patients. “It’s been like night and day,” says Anderson, who works with two other physicians at Hilton Family Practice, one of 80 clinics owned by Riverside Medical Group. “I don’t have to do rounds or admit my emergency patients; I can even leave town on weekends when I’m on call,” he says. Anderson says he had to mull the idea over for a few years before signing up with a hospitalist service. After calculating that using a hospitalist could eliminate 70 percent to 80 percent of his night calls, Anderson gave it a try in the late 1990s. Today, he’s a convert. “The office is my domain, so my comfort level is much higher there than at the hospital,” Anderson says. “To top it off, I’m making more money because I can start 45 minutes earlier at the office and see three or four patients in that time as opposed to just one or two on rounds.” LEARNING OBJECTIVES After completing this article, readers will be able to: If you aren’t using one of these specialists yet, you may be soon. Anderson and thousands of other physicians — primary-care physicians and specialists alike — find that using a hospitalist allows them to spend more time in the office producing outpatient revenue. And for some, just the promise of taking their weekends and evenings back is enough. GROWING FAST • Conduct a cost/benefit analysis for using a hospitalist service • Delineate the types of services that a trained hospitalist can offer • Generate a communication plan for the primary-care physician and hospitalist As Anderson and other physicians across the nation jump on the hospitalist bandwagon, the field grows by leaps and bounds. Today, some 20,000 hospitalists are working for hospitals, hospitalist groups, academic medical centers, large multispecialty groups, and integrated healthcare delivery organizations. That’s a far cry from the fewer than 1,000 estimated in 1996 by internist Robert M. Wachter, who coined the term in a New England Journal of Medicine article that year. More growth is ahead, says Patrick J. Cawley, an internist who is president of the board of directors of the Society of Hospital Medicine. The hospitalist professional society, which has about 7,000 members, projects that the hospitalist workforce will top 30,000 within a few years. As the profession grows, so does the competition to recruit new hospitalists. Surveys by the Society of Hospital Medicine peg hospitalist pay at an average total compensation of $193,000 nationally. SEPTEMBER 2008 | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM 91 http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM
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