The medical center has also hired three "hospitalists" expected to draw as many as 300 new patients this year — a move that Stephen Shortell, a health policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley described as an innovative and positive move. The hospitalists are physicians on staff who work with private doctors who admit patients to NCMC.

A recent article in Modern Health Care said hospitalists are practicing throughout the country, but no one knows how many there are because they are not organized in any association and they go by many different names: hospital-based specialist or internist, admitting doctor, rounder — and hospitalist, a term proposed by two University of California, San Francisco, doctors.

The explosive growth of managed care has led to an increased role for general internists and other primary care physicians in the American health care system. … We believe the hospitalist specialty will burgeon for several reasons.