50 Studies Every Hospitalist Should Know

Hospital medicine is rapidly growing, driven by the increasing complexity of acutely ill patients and efficiency considerations. The field has expanded significantly, with over 60,000 hospitalists in the United States, including physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. These professionals face endless diagnostic dilemmas and management options for ever more complex patients, as well as administrative pressure to improve care quality while controlling costs. Pay-for-performance incentives and medicolegal requirements further emphasize the need for current evidence-based management.

Specialty societies provide evidence-based guidelines for clinical care. However, managing individual patients on a general medicine service often requires detailed knowledge of key studies to determine if guidelines or meta-analyses are applicable. Understanding study populations and treatment effect sizes is crucial for making personalized management decisions and guiding patients and caregivers.

50 Studies Every Hospitalist Should Know introduces readers to pivotal articles that impact daily clinical practice and inform management recommendations. The book highlights essential details of each study, helping readers assess strengths and limitations not evident in guidelines and reviews. This knowledge aids providers in selecting therapeutic strategies and advising patients and families. The selected studies are high-yield and relevant to hospitalists’ everyday decisions. The book is also a valuable teaching tool for trainees, illustrating evidence-based medicine and its application to patient cases.

Benjamin P. Geisler is a hospitalist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Throughout his career, he has worked in various roles on health-economic evaluations, systematic reviews and with real world evidence such as population-based health registries. Dr. Geisler has also worked on quality and safety topics, as well as in a research group that focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Dr. Geisler’s career interest is the interface between new health technologies, their evidence base, and value.

Jeffrey L. Greenwald is an academic hospitalist at Massachusetts General Hospital whose career has taken him into the fields of HIV testing, care transitions, quality improvement and patient safety, medical education, and, for the last several years, primary palliative care education and implementation. He is an active clinician and teacher and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.

Kathy May Tran is an academic hospitalist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, teacher at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Editor of the Case Records of the New England Journal of Medicine. In addition to her identities as an active clinician, medical educator, and writer and editor, Dr. Tran is an advocate for workforce well-being, patient experience, and the arts and humanities in medicine.