Specialist support for hospitalists: What kinds of ‘ists’ do you work with?

HOSPITALISTS GET SPECIALIST support from the usual list of specialties—think cardiology and pulmonology, for example—but they also work with specialists who are generally found only inside hospitals. This category includes physicians like laborists and surgicalists, some of whom were created in the image of hospitalists.

But exactly how common are these “ists?” In our 2024 Compensation & Career Survey, we asked hospitalists what kinds of specialist support they get from hospital-specific physicians.

The most common specialty on the list was intensivists. More than three-quarters (79%) of hospitalists who treat adults said their hospital uses intensivists. The only exception was those working at smaller hospitals (under 100 beds) where less than half of hospitalists said they worked with intensivists.

We found other differences in specialist support for hospitalists. Neurohospitalists, for example, tended to be more common in adult medicine groups (33.7%) than for pediatric hospitalist groups (8.3%). We also found more surgicalists in adult groups (24.4%) than pediatric ones (16.7%).

In general, pediatric hospitalist groups used fewer “ists.” While 15% of adult hospitalists said they used none of the types of specialists we asked about, 25% of pediatric hospitalists used none of them in their groups.

Here are other trends we found in the use of “ists”:

• Surgicalists were more popular in the nonacademic setting, where 27.1% of adult hospitalists in our survey worked with them. In the academic setting, by comparison, 20.9% of hospitalists reported working with surgicalists.

• Addiction medicine specialists were more popular in academic medicine, where 29.1% of adult hospitalists reported getting specialist support from this group. By comparison, only 14% of nonacademic adult hospitalists reported working with addiction medicine specialists.

• Laborists were least popular in universities and medical schools, where they were used by 18.2% of adult groups. Among hospitalists employed by hospitals, by comparison, 34.7% of adult hospitalists said they got support from laborists.

Hospitalists working in smaller hospitals were less likely to have support from these specialists. Among hospitalists working at hospitals with fewer than 100 beds, for example, nearly 50% said they didn’t get support from any of these specialists. At hospitals with more than 500 beds, only 4.9% of hospitalists said they didn’t work with any of these specialties.

We found a similar trend in hospitalist group size and specialist support. In groups with only one to nine hospitalists, for example, 39.1% said they didn’t work with any of the specialties we asked about. But in groups with more than 50 hospitalists, by comparison, only 2.8% didn’t work with any of them.

Here’s a list of percentages of hospitalists who get specialist support from hospital-based specialties:

• Intensivists: 78.9%
• Neurohospitalists: 33.7%
• Laborists: 29.8%
• Surgicalists: 24.4%
• Addiction specialists: 16.2%
• Extensivists/SNFists: 4.5%
• None of the above: 15.0%

For data on how physician compensation is affected by bonuses, experience, shift work and location, check out our overview on hospitalist pay.