09/16/2009 - News
Hospitalists May Improve Quality of Care
By: June Chen, MD
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Hospitalists are physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners whose primary professional focus is hospital medicine. Little is known about the association between hospitalists and their influence on hospital-level quality indicators. In a recent issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers report that hospitals with hospitalists scored better performance on hospital-level quality indicators for certain medical conditions.
Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and their colleagues examined 3,619 hospitals reporting Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA) data, 1,461 of which employed hospitalists. They found the hospitals with hospitalists tended to be large, private, not-for-profit, teaching institutions in the southern United States. They also found that the average composite HQA scores were higher for hospitals with hospitalists as compared to those without for heart attack, congestive heart failure, and pneumonia, as well as for counseling and prevention.
Overall, the researchers found that hospitals with hospitalists performed significantly better than those without hospitalists for all aspects of overall disease treatment and diagnosis. Hospitalists are still a relatively new phenomenon in American medicine, and they represent one of the most rapidly growing forms of medical practice in the United States. Based on this study, it seems that hospitalists may contribute to improving hospital-level quality of healthcare.
Source:
Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(15):1389-1394.
Created on: 09/16/2009
Reviewed on: 09/16/2009
Reviewed on: 09/16/2009
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