Hospitalists fill need for area hospital patients, physicians

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A doctor who is board-certified in in-ternal medicine, critical-care medicine and geriatric medicine is using those skills in his job as a hospitalist at Skaggs Community Health Center, located on north Business Highway 65 in Branson.|ret||ret||tab|

Dr. Steve Zeiler has been a hospitalist at Skaggs, a 111-bed hospital, since Jan-uary. He joined two other hospitalists on staff at Skaggs, Dr. Wanda J. Ethen and Dr. Dan Woodward. |ret||ret||tab|

According to a Skaggs news release, a hospitalist is a medical specialist who works in conjunction with the patient's doctor, providing medical treatment to individuals while they are in the hospital. |ret||ret||tab|

Hospitalists often specialize in internal medicine, and they generally have ex-tensive hands-on experience in treating patients with medical problems that re-quire emergency care or hospitalization. |ret||ret||tab|

Also, full-time hospitalists generally don't maintain private outpatient practices, so they devote their time solely to caring for hospitalized patients, the re-lease said.|ret||ret||tab|

Zeiler's responsibilities include admitting patients who don't have doctors. He also does medical consulting for surgeons and other physicians while seeing patients whose doctors are located out of the Branson area. |ret||ret||tab|

He said he sees a lot of patients who don't have a local doctor because of the large number of tourists in Branson.|ret||ret||tab|

Zeiler said some of the doctors he works with will initially feel threatened by hospitalists and what they do. "They think someone's going to do their business. But then they realize that a hospitalist reduces the number of patients the doctors have to see that they don't know."|ret||ret||tab|

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Job requirements|ret||ret||tab|

Zeiler said while there is no special training necessary, a hospitalist needs to have "an interest in taking care of acutely ill patients who require hospitalization, as opposed to patients who are chronically ill (and) are seen in an office."|ret||ret||tab|

The trio also gets some help from Dr. Alastair Haddow, who has a private practice in Branson and also works part-time as a hospitalist at Skaggs.|ret||ret||tab|

There are plans to add another hospitalist at Skaggs in July, Zeiler said.|ret||ret||tab|

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Cox and St. John's|ret||ret||tab|

In addition to the program Skaggs has at its facility, St. John's and Cox Medical Center South have hospitalist programs.|ret||ret||tab|

According to hospital officials, Cox also started its hospitalist program last month. |ret||ret||tab|

Dr. Frank Romero, an internal medicine physician, began working at Cox South in January. |ret||ret||tab|

He is board certified and has an office in the hospital.|ret||ret||tab|

The hospitalist program at St. John's began in 1997, according to Dr. Steven Leitch, hospitalist and director of St. John's hospitalist program. St. John's has five hospitalists, all of whom specialize in internal medicine, and the health system hopes to hire two more in the near future.|ret||ret||tab|

Leitch said hospitals are more technical and handle more acute care than they used to, and the increased use of hospitalists has been a positive advance for patients.|ret||ret||tab|

"It makes it easier for them to get taken care of. It's a nice service for a hospital to offer folks," Leitch said.|ret||ret||tab|

He noted that much of what hospitalists do is help the patients of out-of town doctors have smooth transitions into in-patient hospital care.|ret||ret||tab|

"We also spend a lot of our time taking care of the uninsured patients that come through the emergency room, making sure that they get pretty much the same level of service everybody else gets," Leitch said. |ret||ret||tab|

Leitch has directed St. John's hospitalist program since its inception, having left an office-based practice to do so. Leitch said that, in most cases, hospitalists don't maintain private practices and with good reason.|ret||ret||tab|

"Once you start building a private practice, it builds to the point that then you have to spend full time doing the private practice, and you can't do the hospitalist work any more," he said.|ret||ret||tab|

(SBJ Inside Business Editor Maria Hoover contributed to this story.)[[In-content Ad]]