Date and Time
April 5, 2006
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
David Meltzer, MD - Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Chicago

Hospitalists are the fastest-growing medical specialty in the U.S., now caring for approximately 1/3 of all hospitalized general medical patients. However, there is still limited data on hospitalists' impacts on costs and outcomes, and almost no data on the mechanisms by which they may produce such effects.

This Research in Progress seminar will focus on the initial results of the Multicenter Trial of Academic Hospitalists, which studies 31,000 admissions to six academic medical centers over a two-year period. The primary results suggest that hospitalists can generate resource savings and improved outcomes, though the effects are not as consistent as those reported in some early studies. Moreover, we find that the effectiveness of hospitalists is strongly influenced by disease-specific experience and by social network effects that influence the diffusion of practice patterns among physicians. These learning-by-doing and social network effects have significant implications for the organization of this emerging medical specialty.