The Best HOSPITALIST Professionals in West Virginia

  About HOSPITALIST in West Virginia

A hospitalist is a subspecialty of physician who treats patients solely in a hospital. Hospitalists practice what is known as hospital medicine, a medical specialty centered on the care of acutely ill hospitalized patients. Hospitalists do not maintain outside practices but provide exclusive care to patients during their hospital stay. This improves the oversight and consistency of care for patients while providing a timely response outside of your primary doctor's usual hospital rounds (times when doctors visit their patients who are admitted to hospitals). Hospitalists are attending physicians responsible for drawing up a treatment plan and the patient's overall care, from admission to discharge. Hospitalists may intervene if needed but are essentially on call to address a patient's immediate medical needs. The term 'hospitalist' was coined in 1996 by Drs. Robert Wachter and Lee Goldman of the University of California, San Francisco, to describe a new model for inpatient care. The overriding role of a hospitalist is to improve the quality of care of hospitalized patients. Doing so can reduce the length of a hospital stay, the cost of hospitalization, and the rate of hospital readmission. Hospitalists serve as generalists, meaning they possess the education, experience, and certification to appropriately address the general medical needs of patients regardless of their condition. If there is an issue outside of the scope of the physician's practice, a specialist will be called in. A hospitalist is not a 'second-string' doctor but a fully qualified physician who simply prefers to practice in a hospital setting. Once a patient is discharged, a hospitalist no longer participates in that patient's ongoing care other than to consult with the primary physician during the transition. Some patients appear to benefit from hospitalist care, including people requiring extensive physical rehabilitation. Most studies suggest that hands-on, physician-led oversight appears to speed recuperation. For example, a 2009 study out of Loyola University in Chicago involving 140 patients who had undergone orthopedic reconstruction surgery, concluded that hospitalist care reduced the duration of hospital stays by 3.8 days and benefited severely ill patients the most. Most hospitalists are trained and board-certified in internal medicine (branch of medicine concerned with the medical care of adults), although some come from other fields of medicine, such as family practice or pediatrics (branch of medicine concerned with the medical care of children). As part of the hospital system, a hospitalist is responsible for improving—and sometimes tracking and measuring—the quality of patient care. They are not involved with cost management, budgets, or medical reimbursements, tasks typically assigned to the hospital administrator. Rather, their role is centered purely around patients' needs. Hospitalists also serve as leaders in initiatives to improve patient safety. This includes reducing hospital-acquired diseases, ensuring the timely and appropriate discharge of patients, and reducing the 30-day hospital readmission rate. In their comanagement capacity, hospitalists also relieve some of the financial and time-management strains experienced by primary care doctors. Today, the responsibility of patient care is increasingly shared by the outpatient internist who sees patients in an office and the inpatient hospitalist who treats patients in the hospital. Depending on the size of the hospital, hospitalists will sometimes take on a specialist role. This is especially true of doctors who enter the profession from fields such as surgery, neurology (branch of medicine concerned with disorders of the nervous system), cardiology (branch of medicine concerned with disorders of the heart and blood vessels), or pediatrics. Hospital medicine is constantly evolving and finding new and better ways to utilize a doctors skills. To this end, there is an ever-widening range of subspecialties a hospitalist may choose to pursue, including: Admitists are responsible for the appropriate admission and discharge of patients, Neurohospitalists care for patients who are being treated or are at risk of neurological problems, Nocturnists are hospitalists who work 12-hour shifts overnight, Proceduralists oversee and perform procedures like lumbar punctures, catheter insertions, enteral feeding, and oxygen intubation, Rounders are hospitalists who devote their full attention to admitted patients, and Surgicalists are surgeons who work exclusively in surgical wards. As with all physicians, hospitalists must complete a four-year bachelor’s degree plus four years of medical school to obtain their medical degree.4 Thereafter, the hospitalist candidate must complete several years of graduate medical education (GME), which includes a one-year internship and three years of residency training. Some residency programs have developed instructional tracks that address the key facets of hospital medicine, including quality assessment/quality improvement (QA/QI) and the transition of care from inpatient to outpatient. As a relatively new specialty, board certification was previously not actively pursued by many hospitalists nor required by all hospitals. The need for that requirement began to change with the growing presence of the American Board of Hospital Medicine (ABHM), which was founded in 2009 and is a part of the American Board of Physician Specialties (ABPS). In addition to ABHM certification, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) offers certification programs to obtain the Focused Practice in Hospital Medicine (FPHM) designation. Being a hospitalist requires empathy, compassion, flexibility, experience, interpersonal skills, and stamina to deal with an ever-changing roster of medical conditions and personalities. It's not uncommon for patients to say that hospitalists are the staff members that seem to offer them the most comfort and reassurance during their hospital stay.

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