NEW YORK, Sept. 25 (UPI) -- Patients cared for by a hospital-based physician -- a hospitalist -- may have a shorter length of stay than those who are not, a U.S. study found.
Hospitalists provide care for medical inpatients and staff medical teaching rounds in an academic medical center, said Dr. William N. Southern of the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.
Southern and colleagues at Montefiore and the University Hospital for Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, reviewed data on all patients discharged from a 381-bed teaching hospital from July 1, 2002, to June 30, 2004. The patients were assigned to either a hospitalist or non-hospitalist team at the time of admission.
During the study period, there were 9,037 discharges included in the analysis and of these, 2,913 were cared for by hospitalist teams while 6,124 were cared for by non-hospitalist teams.
The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found the average length of stay in the hospitalist group was 5.01 days, compared with 5.87 days in the non-hospitalist group.
The earlier discharge may reflect closer monitoring by hospitalists, who can detect clinical improvement in real time or hospitalists working more closely with discharge planners and social workers to develop a discharge plan, the researchers said.
