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Martin Terplan, MD

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Whether hospitalists actually improve patient care became the subject of an informative debate in a recent issue of the Archives.^1-2 Because hospitalists are internists, their care should not provide relevantly different outcomes from community internists, but to my knowledge, a comparative study has never been done. Perhaps hospitals not yet using hospitalists might be able to design a proper study.

The allusion by Centor² to the reduced educational opportunities internists might face when not engaged in the hospital care of their patients is a little-discussed disadvantage of the hospitalist movement. Williams¹ is correct in stressing the need for adequate communication between hospitalists and primary care physicians, but there is no evidence that hospitalists communicate in-patient problems any better than anyone else. In reality, though, various specialists, not hospitalists, drive the care of most of the complicated cases on our medical wards.

Many in-patient problems often require . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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