An internal medicine hospitalist is a doctor who devotes all of his or her professional time to caring for hospitalized patients with any adult disease affecting the internal organs and systems, such as diseases of the bladder, liver, intestines, and stomach. Unlike a regular internal medicine doctor who may have a private practice and only visits the hospital to see assigned patients, hospitalists in the internal medicine field have no private patients or clinics and instead spend their days diagnosing and treating patients of other doctors, both during short- and long-term facility stays. Internal medicine hospitalists, also known as internists, typically complete seven to eight years of graduate training to specialize in internal medicine. They may also practice a subspecialty such as nephrology, hematology, cardiology, or immunology, giving them both broad and niche knowledge. An internist’s skills and insight are generally regarded as so advanced that, in addition to treating general patients and those in their subspecialty, a full-time internist at a hospital may also counsel fellow doctors and train medical interns and residents.
An internal medicine hospitalist’s daily responsibilities include admitting patients and attending medical rounds, during which the internist consults on patient care, recommends treatment, and manages issues that arise from these treatments, even if that means responding to a call to come to the hospital right away on weekends or in the middle of the night due to a sudden complication. According to some research, internal medicine hospitalists’ advanced skills help acutely ill patients receive better treatment and recover faster than they would with other doctors. Another benefit of having an internal medicine physician on staff full-time at a hospital is that private-practice internists don’t have to waste time going to the hospital to check on their patients; instead, they can hand off their patients to someone with equivalent or greater knowledge. Finally, once a patient’s condition has stabilized or been cured, the internal medicine hospitalist is the person in charge of approving the patient’s discharge.
According to statistics, internal medicine hospitalists make up the majority of hospitalists. One reason for this is that a large part of becoming a licensed internal medicine physician entails working with inpatients in hospitals and learning how to treat serious illnesses. As a result, making the transition to full-time hospitalist is less difficult because they are used to the intensity, unpredictability, and 24-hour demand for their services. In addition, hospitalists typically earn significantly more than private internal medicine physicians. Many schools of internal medicine have expanded their curriculum with hospitalist internships and academic pathways to becoming an internal medicine hospitalist immediately after completing medical residency and before pursuing a subspecialty to meet the future need for internal specialists at the hospital level.