Hospitalist practice: Could it work for you?

Many doctors find that becoming a hospitalist makes their professional lives more manageable and rewarding.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. Nov. 11, 2002.

When in private practice, Paul Allen, MD, squeezed two days of work into one. He spent nine hours at his office in central Washington state, taking a two-hour lunch, which he usually spent visiting patients in the hospital. At the end of the day, the pulmonologist headed back to the hospital for several more hours. The long work days began to chip away at his enthusiasm and his health. Lower reimbursements translated into a salary that was shrinking 5% annually. And he was paying $22,000 a month to run his practice.

"I was tired all the time. I started having chronic headaches," Dr. Allen said. "I figured if I stayed in private practice, I would have serious health problems."

Last year -- after 22 years of being his own boss -- Dr. Allen closed his practice. He heard Stevens Hospital in Edmonds, a Seattle suburb, was starting a hospitalist program. Dr. Allen applied, got the job and became a hospitalist on Feb. 1.

He is part of a growing number of physicians who are choosing to care only for hospitalized patients. There were a few hundred hospitalists in the mid-1990s, but their ranks have grown to more than 6,000 today, said the National Assn. of Inpatient Physicians. By 2010, that amount may triple, the NAIP said.

"There are probably two job openings for every hospitalist," said Larry Wellikson, MD, executive director of the NAIP.

Like Dr. Allen, many hospitalists are physicians who have left traditional practice.

"My best estimate is that half or two-thirds of them [in the mid-1990s] were traditional internists or pediatricians," said Robert M. Wachter, MD, who coined the term hospitalist in 1996 and is chief of medical service at the University of California's San Francisco Medical Center. [...]