If you have been a patient in a hospital lately, you may have noticed a new member of the medical family.
A "hospitalist" is an expert in hospital medicine, a specialist whose focus is the hospitalized patient.
The concept of hospitalists grew out of a variety of concerns in the United States: patient safety, rising health-care costs, increasing demands on primary-care physicians, and the lack of any single hospital-based provider to coordinate the care of patients in the hospital.
Several large, prestigious health-care facilities began the trend, and today 40 percent of hospitals in the U.S. employ hospitalists, including A.O. Fox Memorial, where we have three such physicians.
It is becoming more the norm for physicians to choose either outpatient (office) care or inpatient (hospital) care because it is not easy to do both.
Traditionally, doctors would spend the morning visiting the patients they had admitted to the hospital, then moving on to the office to see outpatients in the afternoon. It was a difficult and demanding schedule that often left the doctor in the hospital when he was needed at the office and vice versa.
Having a hospitalist could mean a shorter hospital stay. According to the largest hospitalist study to date, hospital stays are shorter when managed by a hospitalist, in comparison with hospital stays managed by a general internist or family physician.
Hospitalists are uniquely skilled at taking care of people in the hospital _ from admission to discharge.
A hospitalist doesn't have to leave for several hours to see his office practice patients and can often get you in and out of the hospital faster.
Having a hospitalist also means you have a doctor who knows the ins and outs of how the hospital operates.
They are familiar with the array of people and processes at work inside a hospital and have close working relationships with everyone from the nurses to the administrators. They may also facilitate connections with after-care providers, such as home-health, skilled nursing and specialized rehabilitation.
What can you do to make the most of a hospitalist's services?
Prepare a contact list of all your health-care providers.
Be sure the hospitalist teams up with the people who know the most about your health.
Because the health needs of older adults can be complex, the hospitalist should talk to your primary-care provider. Also prepare a list of all your medications and allergies. Take the list with you to the hospital, and if friends or family members accompany you, make sure they have this information too.
Of course, you may still be visited by your primary-care physician while hospitalized, especially at a community hospital like Fox, where often our doctors have known their patients for many years.
Dr. Carlton Rule is executive vice president of A.O. Fox Memorial Hospital in Oneonta.
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