Hospitals want two things: To fix and care for patients. Okay, so perhaps that's only one thing, but it is still one of the guiding principles hospitals strive to work and run by. One path that many hospitals have taken over the years to ensure that their patients are cared for is the hiring of hospitalists.

A hospitalist is someone who is hired solely to look after a patient. In essence, a hospitalist has more time than a doctor to give the attentive care and treatment a patient might need. The debate however, is whether hospitalists actually make a difference in a patient's care (and whether the additional price is worth the so-called fuss).

Some groups say yes. A recent study that focused on heart attack patients found that hospitals with hospitalists adhered more closely to standards of quality care than their hospitalist-less counter parts.

Other groups are more skeptical. Centor and Taylor, doctors at the University of Alabama, believe that other factors are more contributive to the overall care quality of patients, such as hospital size and budget and individually established standards of care.

Whether hospitalists make care of a patient better, the most important lesson to take from the debate is the fact that the already established standards of quality care need to be A) consistently met, 100 percent of the time and B) heightened. It's not enough to have a scheduled routine of check ups.

To read the full article, click here: http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/08/10/do-hospitalists-improve-the-quality-of-care-in-hospitals/