The hospitalist: better value in inpatient care?

From perhaps a few hundred practitioners in 1996 to an estimated 30,000 today, the discipline called hospital medicine has shown remarkably rapid growth. It represents a fundamental separation of the inpatient and outpatient components of internal and family medicine. The split has implications for the quality and efficiency of care delivery, the outlook for the physician workforce, and the development of new models such as accountable care organizations (ACOs).