If you are admitted to St. John's Hospital in Springfield and you don't have a primary care physician or your primary care physician is located several miles away, one of St. John's hospitalists will coordinate your care.

"Hospitalists are physicians who are dedicated to caring for and coordinating specialty care for patients admitted to the hospital," says the program's medical director Andrew Evans, MD, MBA, who moved from a private internal medicine practice to join St. John's hospitalists program. "We act as the patient's primary care physician while they are in the hospital."

Hospitalists are located at the hospital and can work with the patient's physician to keep him or her informed about the care the patient is receiving at the hospital and any follow-up care needed upon discharge. Once a patient leaves the hospital, the primary care physician is again responsible for his or her care.

"We staff the hospital 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We admit about 25 new patients (a day) and we generally have somewhere between 50 and 80 patients in our care at one time," Evans says. "It's been shown beneficial both to the primary care physician and the hospital to support a hospitalist program," he adds.

What is a Hospitalist?

Most hospitalists are trained as internists, family medicine practitioners or critical-care specialists. The term hospitalist was first used in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996. Since then, a group of hospitalists formed the Society of Hospital Medicine which now has a few thousand members.

What if I already have a primary care doctor?

For patients who already have a primary care physician, it's the physician's choice whether to ask the hospitalists to care for their patients. Time is often a factor, especially when the patient's physician is located several miles from St. John's.