Hospitalist programs in academic medical centers

The use of hospitalists in the care of in‐patients is a relatively new phenomenon in the USA – hospitalists are delivering medical care to patients in private practice, public hospitals, and academic medical centers. Several obstacles hinder understanding of the characteristics of academic medical center‐based hospitalists. These include differences in definitions and nomenclature, differences in job descriptions, roles and administration across hospitalist programs, and in qualifications and credentialing of hospitalists versus other physicians. These differences derive from the heterogeneity of AMCs by bed size, level of local and regional competition, and cultural, utilization and referral patterns. The field needs an agreed definition of the term “hospitalist”. Assuming a good definition, one could take advantage of already good descriptive data on AMCs to quantify hospitalists within AMCs and to study how hospitalist programs vary by AMC characteristics.