Hospitalist medicine, still a relatively new area of practice, recently marked its 20th anniversary.

The term refers to doctors who focus on work in hospitals, instead of any single medical specialty.

A white paper by HASC endorsed business partner Merritt Hawkins provides a detailed summary of the term and its history. To read the complete paper, please click below.

 An excerpt from the white paper is included below.  

In 1996, Robert M. Wachter, MD and Lee Goldman, MD, MPH, coined the term “hospitalist” to describe a new class of specialists defined not be the types of maladies or organ systems they treat but by the site of service in which they practice (i.e., the hospital).

Twenty years ago, only a few hundred doctors practiced as hospitalists. By 2003, the first year the American Hospital Association began tracking hospitalists, there were about 10,000. Today, the number of physicians practicing as hospitalists has grown to approximately 52,000.

Contact:
Shauna Day
(213) 538-0772
sday@hasc.org