Future Looking Bright for Hospitalists 
The number of hospitalists employed in America continues to steadily grow despite the fact that the hospitals employing them are trending toward consolidation. According to a March 31 report from ModernHealthcare.com, consolidation is turning out to be a good thing for hospitalists and hospitalist management companies. If current trends continue, the consolidation of hospital groups will even be a good thing for hospitalist locums as well. From a financial standpoint, the consolidation trend just makes good business sense. Medical care is no different than any other industry in the sense that a fractured marketplace is a more difficult environment in which to do business, especially if hospitals and other medical facilities want to streamline operations and maximize profits. Consolidation, which is a natural part of the streamlining process, inevitably ends up absorbing smaller facilities and private practices, thus moving more physicians from independence to hospitalist jobs.
Hospitalist Management Companies
One of the more interesting aspects of the consolidation trend lies in who manages the many hospitalists working for a consolidated medical group. As ModernHealthcare.com so deftly points out, hospitals are notoriously poor at managing large groups of doctors, hence the need for hospitalist management companies. These management companies don't actually employ the hospitalists in most cases; they simply manage them as a group on behalf of the hospital employer.
In many cases management companies are more than happy to use hospitalist locums to fill staffing needs on both a short- and long-term basis. Indeed, one of the advantages they have is the fact that care is standardized across all of the facilities where their hospitalists are employed. So a locum who works at one facility on a three-month assignment can then move to another facility in the same medical group without missing a beat. The location may change, but the way healthcare services are delivered by the hospitalist locums is the same.
Future of Private Practice
As the trend toward consolidation has picked up, it has led many to question the future of private practice and, by extension, the future of hospitalist groups. Even now there are plenty of private medical practices aligning themselves with hospitals to the extent that their offices are simply becoming extensions of the institutions they are aligned with. Many of the doctors employed by these practices are already working much the same way the hospitalist counterparts are; their offices acting as satellites for the hospital.
This would suggest that the future of private practice in the United States may indeed be fading. Should that happen, it would open the door for many more physicians to transition to working as hospitalist locums, moving from one facility to the next in a large, consolidated hospital group that could ostensibly cover multiple states. For staffing agencies, it would mean more business as well as greater recruiting efforts to find qualified hospitalist locums to fill open positions.
They say change is good. The question is, does it hold true where consolidation of healthcare is concerned?