Hospital Medicine

Hospital Medicine is a relatively new subspecialty of Internal Medicine that has now become a discipline in widespread use throughout the United States, and it is being used more frequently in Canada and Australia as well. Internists practicing hospital medicine are frequently called “hospitalists”. The need for this type of physician grew out of the increasing complexity of patients requiring hospital care and the need for dedicated members to oversee their management. By focusing their practice on this specific group of patients, 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 these 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.

Currently our Hospital Medicine program is incorporated into our general Internal Medicine residency program. Residents participate in direct care of hospitalized patients and return those patients and their outcomes to their primary providers upon discharge. Residents also participate and receive training in the management of patients with regard to 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.