Hospital Medicine

A hospitalist is a clinician whose primary professional focus is the general medical care of hospitalized patients. Hospitalists engage in clinical care, teaching, research and enhancing the performance of hospitals and healthcare system.Hospitalists are focused around a site of care (the hospital) rather than an organ (like cardiology), a disease (like oncology) or a patient’s age (like pediatrics). Unlike other medical specialties, hospitalists help manage patients through the continuum of hospital care, often seeing patients in the emergency room, following them into the critical care unit and organizing post-acute care.  Many of these benefits may result from hospitalists simply spending more time becoming experts in the delivery of care in the hospital. This fellowship — and a growing number of colleagues around the nation — believe that hospital medicine is sufficiently distinct from general internal medicine to justify special training in this field.