Dr. Carrie Jo Prather is finishing up the third year of her internal medicine residency at Palmetto General Hospital in Hialeah, Fla., in September and she’s starting to look for a job as a hospitalist.
Dr. Prather, who is in the residency’s hospital medicine training track, is sending out her CV sparingly and finding openings through word of mouth so that she can avoid the flood of unsolicited phone calls from potential employers and recruiters. And she’s only looking for jobs where she can work seven days on, seven days off.
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Photo courtesy Dr. Carrie Jo Prather
Dr. Carrie Jo Prather (left) and Dr. Kimberly Leu (right) pose with their residency director Dr. Robert Hasty (center). Dr. Prather is a third-year internal medicine resident at Palmetto General Hospital in Hialeah, Fla. Dr. Leu recently graduated.
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"They’re long days. They’re hard days. They’re sick patients. But then you’ve got a whole week off," she said. For Dr. Prather, a schedule like that would allow her to stay in Florida, where she owns a house, and still travel to Michigan to see her family frequently.
Dr. Prather is fairly typical of young hospitalists entering the field these days. She’s enthusiastic about the pace and acuity offered in treating hospitalized patients. She’s attracted to the work/life balance of the hospitalist schedule. She wouldn’t consider an office-based practice, at least not for right now. And she’s in demand.
The latest figures from the health care recruiting firm Merritt Hawkins show that hospitalists were the third most-requested search assignment in 2010-2011. And hospitalists have been in the top four most-requested specialties for the last five years. The figures come from the firm’s "2011 Review of Physician Recruiting Incentives" report, which provides an overview of salaries, bonuses, and other incentives used in recruiting physicians.
The report also found that hospitalists can command salaries between $160,000 and $305,000, with an average salary of $217,000. That average salary has risen every year in the last five years.
Internal medicine has become one of the hardest search requests for the firm to fill, in part because so many internal medicine physicians are choosing to practice as hospitalists, according to the 2011 report.
Tommy Bohannon, vice president of hospital-based recruiting at Merritt Hawkins, said he doesn’t see young physicians flocking to hospital medicine instead of ambulatory internal medicine. However, he does see a stricter divide between the two practice settings, with new graduates choosing to join either a hospitalist practice or one where they only see patients in the office setting. The traditional practice style, where the general internist combined ambulatory and hospital work, is becoming much less common, he said.
"Everybody’s kind of choosing sides, it seems, based on what kind of lifestyle they want and what type of practice they want," Mr. Bohannon said. "But there are very few left in the middle."
For Dr. Prather, the decision to go into hospital medicine came early in her training. She seized on the idea of hospital medicine early on when she realized it would fulfill her desire to treat sick, complicated patients. The other thing that convinced her to pursue hospital medicine was observing general internists in traditional practices that combine hospital and ambulatory work. The experience of seeing those doctors running all over town to visit their hospitalized patients, only to incur the ire of office patients who were always kept waiting, turned her off to that type of practice.
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