FAQs about Hospital Specialists

> FAQs
Q: What is 'Hospital Medicine'?
A: The fastest-growing medical specialty in the U.S. focusing on the treatment of hospitalized patients. In October of 2006, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) announced plans to recognize hospital medicine as a distinct field of Internal Medicine, and began pursuing a plan of Focused Recognition for Hospital Medicine.

Q: What are Hospitalists?
A: Physicians whose primary professional focus is the general medical care of hospitalzed patients. This includes patient cre, teaching, research and leadership related to hospital care. Many patients are referred to hospitalists by their primary care physicians (PCPs) for treatment during the duration of their hospitalization, returning to the care of their PCPs after discharge. Hospitalists consult on and treat patients referred by surgeons and medical subspecialists during their hospitalization. Hospitalists also care for the 'unassigned patient' who has no primary doctor.

Q: What type of training has a hospitalist undergone?
A: About 75 percent of practicing hospitalists are traied in general internal medicine, while 11 percent are trained in general pediatrics, 3 percent in family practice medicine, 4 percent in an internal medicine subspecialty, 3 percent in internal medicine pediatrics and 3 percent are non-physicians or physician assistants.*

Q: What is the number of practicing hospitalists?
A: Toward the end of 2006, there was an estimated 20,000 practicing hospitalists, making hospital medicine about the size of gastroenterolgy or neurology. *

Q: What is the anticipated need of hospitalists?
A: A 1999 manpower analysis initally projected that by the end of the decade, the hospitalist workforce would grow to approximately 20,000 making the field about the size of cardiology. It is now believed that the number of hospitalists could be 30,000 or more by the end of the decade.*
* According to Society of Hospital Medicine