Why Patients Would Want a Primary Doctor who
Goes to the Hospital to be the
Attending Dr. in Charge of his/her Patients

I think patients would want to see a primary doctor who, when his or her patients need to go into the hospital, he will go there not just to say "hi" then leave the patient's overall care and coordination with the specialists to the hospital's hospitalist doctors, but will be the attending doctor in overall charge.

Three Advantages
Why is that important? Because it gives the patients three advantages that are not available with other primary care doctors:

  1. The patient gets personalized care when he/she needs it the most, when he/she is sick enough to go into the hospital. His/her personal doctor knows him/her, can customize his/her care, and also, can get the specialists to customize the care.

  2. Such primary doctors have medical knowledge that is a class above. They see at first hand what serious disease looks like, what complications look like, what possible short- and long-term problems can arise after discharge and how they are related to the hospitalization and the treatment rendered there, and so forth. They also treat serious disease and all the coomplications, along with nurses, specialists and other providers, at first hand. With such intimate knowledge of serious disease these doctors are better able to nip things in the bud -- they can more quickly recognize the early signs and they know in more depth what to do. And since they know both office and hospital medicine, they are better at keeping a patient's existing conditions, maybe mild now, from developing into serious disease later.

  3. To be able to do both office medicine and hospital medicine, such primary doctors have to constantly read, study and go to seminars to stay up to date.