Do hospitalists really improve patient outcomes?
Long continues the debate of what impact hospitalists have on inpatient outcomes. This issue has been playing out in the medical literature for 20 years, since the coining of the term in 1997. In the most recent iteration of the debate, a study was recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine entitled “Comparison of Hospital Resource Use and Outcomes Among Hospitalists, Primary Care Physicians, and Other Generalists.”
The study retrospectively evaluated health care …