Multi-Sited Ethnography of Emergency of Hospitalist Medicine. Abstract, ExecutiveSummary and Final Report

摘要

Since the advent of managed care in the United States, the social and culturalimpact of the economic restructuring of the practice of medicine, and the reorganization of health care, has been profound (Starr 1982, Stevens 1998). Today, the rapidly changing political economy of health has engendered a heightened awareness and understanding of the emergency of 'hospitalist medicine' is one of these transformations. Hospitalists are both a response to, and constitutive of, these changes, and the hospitalist model represents a major change in the provision of inpatient care in the United States. The underling goal of hospitalist medicine is to deliver efficient, quality patient care while decreasing costs. In 1996 Robert Wachter and Lee Goldman coined the term 'hospitalist' to describe this new 'breed of doctor' and emerging system of health care (Wachter and Goldman 1996:37).