There are now two physicians in the program there, and they are on the verge of getting a third. Dr. Farrar said he doesn’t think there are a lot of pluses to being the lone hospitalist. The most difficult part is avoiding burnout, he warns. Although there were plenty of patients and work for him when he first started at his institution, he wasn’t overwhelmed. But he was relieved when the company brought in a second physician with whom to share call. “I could have easily become overwhelmed quickly had it gone down that road,” he says.
Finding a patient base and physician call backup were not issues for J. Stewart Fulton, DO, medical director of the hospitalist program at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center in Nashua, when he began five years ago as the lone hospitalist. Foundation Medical Partners, a multispecialty group of 27 doctors directly affiliated with the hospital, recruited Dr. Fulton to start a hospitalist program. “I walked into an ideal situation,” he says. “I stepped into a group that had a patient base, that knew they needed hospital coverage, and were willing to support me as I grew to provide 24/7 coverage for myself.”
Dr. Oo taught co-workers and patients about hospital medicine when he joined St. Mary’s Health Center in Jefferson City, Mo., as the facility’s only hospitalist.
Dr. Oo taught co-workers and patients about hospital medicine when he joined St. Mary’s Health Center in Jefferson City, Mo., as the facility’s only hospitalist.
Culture Shock
In July 1998, Joseph Li, MD, director of the hospital medicine program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, was the chief medical resident at that institution when his chief of medicine approached him about starting a hospitalist program.
In the late 1990s there was no model of that kind in Boston. “He hired me as our first full-time hospitalist, and I was referred to as a hospitalist—but nobody really understood what that meant,” says Dr. Li. “Looking back now, I didn’t even really understand what that meant.”
Tin M. Oo, MD, medical director for the hospitalist program at St. Mary’s Health Center in Jefferson City, Mo., practiced for seven months as a lone hospitalist but was hardly a new physician. He has been practicing medicine for 34 years in the U.S. and four other countries: Burma (now Myanmar, his native country), Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Brunei Darussalam. Since he emigrated to the U.S. 15 years ago, he has served as an epidemiologist with the state Department of Health in Minnesota, matriculated into a three-year internal medicine residency program in New York and practiced there, and was in private practice in Chattanooga, Tenn.
When Dr. Oo first came to St. Mary’s, he taught his co-workers, the patients, and their families. “The hospital [and nurses] didn’t have any experience with hospitalists so they didn’t know when to call me and when not to call me,” he says. Dr. Oo got his first hospitalist experience in Chattanooga, Tenn., when he worked with outpatients and some inpatients. His prior experience moonlighting as a hospitalist as well as an emergency physician has helped him greatly as a lone hospitalist. “It was a good thing that I wasn’t just a hospitalist; that I had been in private practice and worked in the ER and as a hospitalist. I knew what the private doctors were facing, and what was coming across from the ER.”
For those who have not yet practiced medicine, Dr. Oo would dissuade them from taking a position as a lone hospitalist. “You have to have a feel for what the ER physicians or what the family practice/ internists, and what the specialists do,” he says. “You also have to be in the hospitalist’s shoes, at least from time to time.”