New data from the American Hospital Association (AHA) showing hospitalists number 23,000 and now practice in 4 out of 5 large hospitals drew the same response from doctors and administrators alike: We know.
“I don’t think a hospitalist program is optional,” says Mark Larey, MD, vice president of medical affairs at St. Joseph’s Mercy Health Center in Hot Springs, Ark. “In today’s environment, due to the regulatory issues, trying to improve patient satisfaction, trying to manage the increased unassigned population, it would be increasingly difficult to keep everything balanced … without a hospitalist service.”
Dr. Larey’s 309-bed hospital has a team of five internists and one nurse practitioner, and is adding a sixth full-time position this fall to absorb increased stress on the emergency department. The situation is typical of the exponential growth of the industry since it started in 1996 with as few as 500 hospitalists, says Larry Wellikson, MD, CEO of SHM.
In many hospitals, hospital medicine has become a quality-care necessity—one that increases satisfaction scores, trims length of stay, and increases emergency-room throughputs, Dr. Wellikson says. AHA figures culled from the 2007 survey of nearly 5,000 community hospitals show that at hospitals with 200 or more beds, 83% have hospital medicine programs. SHM estimates the current hospitalist workforce at 29,000.
“It took emergency medicine 25, 30 years to get to the point hospital medicine got to in 10 years,” Dr. Wellikson says. “It’s the growth of a specialty on steroids.”
For more information, visit http://www.aha.org/aha/research-and-trends/health-and-hospital-trends/2008.html.