The term hospitalist was first coined by Robert Wachter and Lee Goldman in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article.
[4] In the US, a typical hospitalist workday in the hospital lasts roughly 10 hours, arriving around 7 a.m. and taking care of a "census" of 14 to 18 patients.
Hospitalists typically embrace the rhythm of a "7 on 7 off" schedule, starting each seven-day stretch on a Tuesday and ending on a Monday.
A hospitalist is like a football quarterback, a central node coordinating patient care for hospitalized inpatients for the duration of their stay.
Hospitalists form a demographically small but important workforce of doctors in hospitals across Australia where on-site specialist coverage is otherwise unavailable.
Dependent on their place of employment and duties, the responsibilities and remuneration of non-specialist hospitalists are usually comparable to somewhere between registrars and consultants.
These clinicians and employed across Australia in a variety of environments which include Medical & Surgical Wards, Intensive Care Units and Emergency Departments.
The main goal behind the program is to prepare medical doctors with training in family practice to assume shared care roles with other specialists, such as cardiologists, neurologists, and nephrologists, in a hospital setting.
Moreover, the program prepares family physicians by giving them a set of skills required for caring for their complicated hospitalized patients.
According to recent data, there are more than 50,000 hospitalists practicing in approximately 75% of U.S. hospitals, including all highly ranked academic medical centers.
Most of these companies, however, traditionally focus on the emergency department, where billing is lucrative and margins are higher, and they accept the hospitalist group management partnership as a necessary and less profitable add-on.
Research shows that hospitalists reduce the length of stay, treatment costs and improve the overall efficiency of care for hospitalized patients.