A VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS ROUNDTABLE IS AVAILABLE CLICK HERE.

THE USUAL AUDIO FILE IS AVAILABLE BELOW

Your host is old enough to remember when hospital corridors featured physicians with little black bags, scurrying around to see their patients.

That’s no longer true, of course. Most of the physicians seen in those corridors these days are white-coated employees.

The Annals of Internal Medicine reported a few months ago that “By 2018, 71% of newly certified general internists practiced as hospitalists, compared with only 8% practicing as outpatient-only physicians.”  In addition, between 2008 and 2018 mixed-practice physicians — those black-bag-carrying types — declined by over 50%.

To investigate this shift, we gathered five young internists for a roundtable discussion on the attractions of the hospitalist specialty.

Running time: 30 minutes

Annals of Internal Medicine article