HOSPITAL MEDICINE | Division of Internal Medicine

What is Hospital Medicine?

Hospital Medicine involves the care of patients admitted to the hospital and involves care of multiple patients in multiple different scenarios. Internists practicing hospital medicine are frequently called “hospitalists”. By focusing their practice on inpatients, hospitalists gain specialized knowledge in managing very ill patients and are able to provide high quality, evidence-based, and efficient patient care in hospital settings. With the increasing base of medical knowledge needed to practice both inpatient and outpatient medical care, along with the increasing number of rules and regulations regarding both of these, the need for specialization in inpatient care has risen exponentially and the demand for this type of providers has risen with it.

It is the desire of our program to meet the patient care, case management, utilization, and other needs of our own hospital, while also teaching our house staff how to function in this role in the community once they complete their training here.

Training in Hospital Medicine

Hospital Medicine is a division of the Department of Medicine at LSU Health Shreveport and our training in this discipline is incorporated into our general Internal Medicine Residency Program. Residents participate in direct care of hospitalized patients and return those patients to their primary providers upon discharge. Residents also participate and receive training in

efficiency,
meeting social and medical needs,
communication with patient families,
discharge planning,
medical record documentation, and
patient disposition, all of which are vital roles of the hospitalists in any health system.

ACGME and ABIM both now recognize Hospital Medicine as a separate designation, and we hope to soon offer our Internal Medicine residents the opportunity to choose a Hospital Medicine track and complete their residency in Hospital Medicine and to be able to sit for Hospital Medicine board certification upon completion. Our program also offers our faculty, house staff, and students the opportunity to participate in a wide array of research topics pertaining to subjects including clinical medicine, case management, utilization review, quality improvement, patient experience, etc. We are actively recruiting physicians to join our growing staff of academic and clinical hospitalists.