Patients cared for by doctors called "hospitalists," who work full-time in hospitals to focus on general patient care, fare slightly better than those cared for by general internists or family doctors, finds a new study.
Hospitalists reduce a patient's average hospital stay by 12 per cent, and modestly lower treatment costs, the study found. But they do not help lower patients' death risk or the chance that they will have to be readmitted.
Hospitalists are doctors who work full-time at hospitals, performing generalist duties traditionally handled by family doctors or internists making rounds.
Though hospitals in Canada are just beginning to make use of "hospitalists", many hospitals in the U.S. have well-established hospitalist programs. In fact, the category has been one of the fastest-growing medical specialties of the past decade in the U.S., according to the Society of Hospital Medicine.
Researchers from Tufts University School of Medicine decided to take the first wide-scale look at hospitalists, to see whether their use saves hospitals time and money.
They followed 75,000 patients admitted to 45 U.S. hospitals between September 2002 and June 2005 for such common conditions as pneumonia, stroke, chest pain, heart attack or heart failure, and urinary tract infection.
As compared with patients cared for by general internists, those under the watch of hospitalists had a slightly shorter hospital stay, about half a day off the average of four days.
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