With a Dynamic Past and Present, There ’s Little Doubt of a Dynamic Future for HM

In the late 1990s, when  Robert Wachter, MD, found that his vision of and advocacy for the hospital medicine field was starting to get publicity, his father told him about a tennis game he’d played in Florida. One of the players in his game was a doctor. Dr. Wachter talked about the past, present, and (bright) future of the specialty as HM enters its second quarter century. His father said he told the doctor who his son was, “and the doctor said he had heard of me,” Dr. Wachter, chair of internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, recalled in a keynote address at SHM Converge. “I sat there and I kind of puffed my chest out and said, ‘That’s pretty cool,’” he said. But then his dad added, “He hates you.” The very idea of a “hospitalist”—the word Dr. Wachter thought up to describe doctors who would care exclusively for hospitalized patients—brought fierce resistance from many primary care physicians, who were not eager to hand off care of their patients at their sickest moments, and who relied financially on caring for patients in the hospital. In his plenary talk, Dr. Wachter retraced the history of hospital medicine’s origins, not only to show how far the field has come, but also to show how these strides were made in response to the realities of medical care 25 years ago, and how hospital medicine will need to continue to respond to today’s and tomorrow’s realities to continue to thrive. “If there’s a system th...
Source: The Hospitalist - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Hospital Medicine Leadership SHM Converge Source Type: research