Hospital medicine
Hospital medicine is the general medical care of hospitalized patients. Doctors whose primary professional focus is hospital medicine are called hospitalists. Their activities may include patient care, teaching, research, and leadership related to hospital care. Hospital medicine is a specialty organized around a site of care (the hospital) rather than an organ (like cardiology), a disease (like oncology), or a patient?s age (like pediatrics). However, unlike medical specialists in the emergency department or critical care units, hospitalists help manage patients throughout the continuum of hospital care, often seeing patients in the ER, following them into the critical care unit and organizing post-acute care.
About 78 percent of practicing hospitalists are trained in general internal medicine. Another 4 percent are trained in an internal medicine subspecialty, most commonly pulmonary or critical care medicine. About 3 percent of hospitalists are trained in family practice; about 8 percent are pediatricians and 2 percent are trained as med-peds. The remaining 5 percent of hospitalists are non-physician providers, usually nurse practitioners and physician assistants. While there is no board certification in Hospital Medicine at the present time, the concept is moving rapidly towards recognition as a distinct subspecialty. A few distinct residency and fellowship training programs are currently operating at major universities.
