The Importance of Having a Hospitalist

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Hospitalists are physicians who spend 100% of their time in the hospital. The advantage of having a hospitalist is he or she is a coordinating physician among of all the care you would receive while you're in thehospital. But as you know, episodes of care go beyond the hospital setting. And so a shortcoming of the hospitalist model is that there's a handoff involved between the primary care physician and the hospitalist.

Steven Lipstein, President and CEO of BJC HealthCare--a $3 billion hospital system in St. Louis, Missouri--talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the economics of hospitals. They discuss pricing, the advantages and disadvantages of specialization in modern medical care, and culture and governance of non-profit hospitals vs. for-profit hospitals. At the end they talk about the positives and negatives of a national health board patterned after the Federal Reserve.