Thursday, December 31, 2009

Top 10 issues in hospital medicine for 2009, issue 3: hospitalist outcomes and efficiency

This year as in past years leaders of the hospitalist movement continued to promote the model as superior to the traditional model of hospital care in terms of outcomes and efficiency even though the weight of evidence fails to back up the claims. This year also saw the publication of yet another systematic review which made the same claims. The review, like others preceding it, suffered from a case of publication bias as I pointed out here.

A paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine this year purported that hospitalists improve quality, but suffered from confusion on quality and performance. Dr. Robert Centor gave us a dose of healthy skepticism.

No comments: