Media release: Defining hospitalist physicians using clinical practice data

Open Medicine A peer-reviewed, independent, open-access journal. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Defining hospitalist physicians using clinical practice data: a systems level pilot study of Ontario physicians. Today, Open Medicine <http://www.openmedicine.ca/> published a study in which the authors propose and apply a functional method to identify hospital-based physicians and describe the growth and prevalence of a relatively new but poorly-defined specialty—that of hospital-based practice. In the province of Ontario, hospital-based physicians have grown in number since cutbacks to physician reimbursement during the mid-1990s led to an exodus of primary care physicians and consequent recruitment and contracting of family physicians by individual hospitals. But without a single definition of hospitalists, it has not been possible to track just how many there are, or to characterize their practice. More critically, it has been impossible to evaluate whether the hospitalist movement has led to improvements in either efficiency or quality of care. In the present study, the authors used a novel method to identify and characterize hospitalists, combining volume of inpatient care derived from OHIP billings and telephone survey follow-ups with other practice data derived from the ICES Physician Database, which contains demographic and practice data for Ontario-licensed physicians. The idea was to better define hospital-based physicians while recognizing different specialties within ho...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Source Type: blogs