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Hospitalists serve as physicians-of-record for hospitalized patients after accepting “hand-offs” from primary care physicians (PCPs). Patients return to their PCPs at the time of hospital discharge (4). The majority of a hospitalist’s time is devoted to providing direct patient care in the inpatient setting, including attending on general medical units, providing inpatient medical consultation, and caring for patients in intensive care units. Almost all hospitalists provide preoperative evaluation, and roughly one half care for patients in skilled nursing settings. One quarter of all hospitalists maintain outpatient general medicine practices, and one seventh maintain an outpatient subspecialty practice. In addition to their clinical practices, many hospitalists participate in the development of clinical practice guidelines, medical information systems, and quality improvement activities (5). The premise of the hospitalist model is that …