HOW MUCH TIME do hospitalists spend supervising NPs/PAs patient encounters? Our annual survey asked hospitalists how many NP/PA patient encounters they oversee during any given shift. The data offer a window into how often hospitalists work with their nonphysician colleagues.
Hospitalists who treat adults told us that on an average shift, they supervise 6.2 patient encounters with NPs/PAs. For pediatric hospitalists, that number was 5.9.
But those figures are somewhat deceiving, given that half of adult hospitalists (49%) said they have zero supervising encounters with NPs/PAs. Our data also showed that about one-quarter of adult hospitalists said they supervise only one to three NP/PA patient encounters per shift.
Not surprisingly, academic hospitalists work more with NP/PA patient encounters (7.2 per shift) than their nonacademic colleagues (5.4 per shift). But academic hospitalists were also less likely to supervise any NP/PA patient encounters: 58% reported that they supervised zero such visits, compared to 48% of nonacademic hospitalists.
Hospitalists working for local hospitalist groups had the highest number of supervised encounters per shift: 7.2. Hospitalists working for other types of groups reported supervising closer to six such encounters.
More adult hospitalists at national hospitalist management groups said they overesaw NP/PA encounters—only 35% didn’t, compared to half of all adult hospitalists in other employment models. Hospitalists in those groups reported supervising 5.8 NP/PA patient encounters per shift, a number that’s fairly close to the average.
Hospitalists with higher patient volumes reported supervising more NP/PA patient encounters. Physicians with 20 or more patient encounters per day, for example, said they supervise an average of 8.5 NP/PA patient visits per shift.
Our data found some regional variation in hospitalist supervision of NPs/PAs. Hospitalists working in the Northeast, for example, reported supervising 8.0 encounters per shift, well above the average.
Those numbers were also above average for hospitalists for two other regions, but with a twist. While hospitalists in the Pacific reported supervising an average of 7.9 NP/PA patient encounters per shift, most—77%—said they supervise no NP/PA visits at all.
It was a similar story for hospitalists in the Southwest, where 63.5% said they supervised zero NP/PA patient encounters. But among those who do, the number was well above average: 7.7 patient encounters per shift.
The region where hospitalists reported the most activity supervising NP/PA patient encounters was the South, where only 35% said they supervise no such encounters. Among hospitalists in the South who did supervise NP/PA patient encounters, the average number was 5.7 per shift.
NP/PA – hospitalist patient encounters
• None: 49.2%
1-3: 24.3%
4-9: 16.7%
10-14: 5.2%
15 or more: 4.6%
MEAN: 6.2
VIEW DATA ON HOSPITALIST PAY from both the 2024 and the 2023 Today’s Hospitalist Compensation & Career Surveys. Our annual surveys examine how hospitalist compensation is affected by factors such as the type of patients hospitalists treat, the number of shifts they work, the number of patients they see per shift and more.
Most physicians don’t have a contract to provide said supervision. They don’t receive any compensation for it. And the physicians are the ones almost always held responsible. Erroneous assumptions are the tool of the ignorant and most journalists…often one and the same.
This article reports only results from our most recent survey. In that survey, half of responding hospitalists said they don’t supervise NPs/PAs. But half of them do, with supervision numbers varying by geographical region and employer type.