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The Brigham and Women’s/Faulkner Hospitalist Service this month celebrated its 10 year anniversary, marking a decade of tremendous growth and expansion.
“We aim to provide high quality, compassionate inpatient care, to excel as educators and to continuously improve the standards of care,” said Sylvia McKean, MD, medical director of the BW/F Hospitalist Service. “This celebration indicates how far we’ve come in just 10 years.”
The term “hospitalist” was first coined in 1996 to describe physicians who see patients through their entire stay at the hospital in place of that patient’s primary care physician, although the hospitalist and PCP remain in close communication. In 1998, there were more than 1,000 hospitalists in the U.S., including three at BWH. Today, there are nearly 20,000 hospitalists in the country, including 30 at BWH.
Since 1998, the service has expanded to include the BWH general medicine consult service, four general medical resident teams, the Physician Assistant Clinician Educator (PACE) service and half of the Integrated Teaching Unit at Faulkner. The Hospitalist Service is part of the Division of General Internal Medicine, and some of its more than 30 physicians and physician assistants hold academic posts in the Division of Social Medicine and the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics. The BWH Hospitalist Service is critical to the smooth transition of patients who present to BWH’s Emergency Department and are admitted to Faulkner.
Continuously growing and improving services is part of the group’s mission. Projects include prevention of venous thromboembolism and contrast nephropathy, optimizing the use of beta-blockade for cardiac protection and the blood product utilization.