A physician, medical practitioner, medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through the study, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of disease, injury, and other physical and mental impairments. Physicians may focus their practice on certain disease categories, types of patients, and methods of treatment—known as specialities—or they may assume responsibility for the provision of continuing and comprehensive medical care to individuals, families, and communities—known as general practice. Medical practice properly requires both a detailed knowledge of the academic disciplines, such as anatomy and physiology, underlying diseases and their treatment—the science of medicine—and also a decent competence in its applied practice—the art or craft of medicine.
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It conducts research and teaching in medical and biological sciences.
Hospital medicine is a medical specialty that exists in some countries as a branch of family medicine or internal medicine, dealing with the care of acutely ill hospitalized patients. Physicians whose primary professional focus is caring for hospitalized patients only while they are in the hospital are called hospitalists. Originating in the United States, this type of medical practice has extended into Australia and Canada. The vast majority of physicians who refer to themselves as hospitalists focus their practice upon hospitalized patients. Hospitalists are not necessarily required to have separate board certification in hospital medicine.
Family medicine is a medical specialty within primary care that provides continuing and comprehensive health care for the individual and family across all ages, genders, diseases, and parts of the body. The specialist, who is usually a primary care physician, is named a family physician. It is often referred to as general practice and a practitioner as a general practitioner. Historically, their role was once performed by any doctor with qualifications from a medical school and who works in the community. However, since the 1950s, family medicine / general practice has become a specialty in its own right, with specific training requirements tailored to each country. The names of the specialty emphasize its holistic nature and/or its roots in the family. It is based on knowledge of the patient in the context of the family and the community, focusing on disease prevention and health promotion. According to the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA), the aim of family medicine is "promoting personal, comprehensive and continuing care for the individual in the context of the family and the community". The issues of values underlying this practice are usually known as primary care ethics.
Health technology is defined by the World Health Organization as the "application of organized knowledge and skills in the form of devices, medicines, vaccines, procedures, and systems developed to solve a health problem and improve quality of lives". This includes pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures, and organizational systems used in the healthcare industry, as well as computer-supported information systems. In the United States, these technologies involve standardized physical objects, as well as traditional and designed social means and methods to treat or care for patients.
Inpatient care is the care of patients whose condition requires admission to a hospital. Progress in modern medicine and the advent of comprehensive out-patient clinics ensure that patients are only admitted to a hospital when they are extremely ill or have severe physical trauma.
Eric Jeffrey Topol is an American cardiologist, scientist, and author. He is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, and a senior consultant at the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. He is editor-in-chief of Medscape and theheart.org. He has published three bestseller books on the future of medicine: The Creative Destruction of Medicine (2010), The Patient Will See You Now (2015), and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (2019). He was also commissioned by the UK from 2018–2019 to lead planning for the National Health Service's future workforce, integrating genomics, digital medicine, and artificial intelligence.
The American Board of Hospital Medicine (ABHM) is a Member Board of the American Board of Physician Specialties (ABPS), the nation's third largest physician multispecialty certifying organization and was founded in 2009. The ABHM is North America's first and only board of certification devoted exclusively to hospital medicine founded by hospitalists and governed by hospitalists.
The Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) is a membership society for hospitalists, physicians, and other caregivers who practice the specialty of hospital medicine.
Mary Bridget Duffy is an early pioneer in the creation of hospitalist medicine. She was chosen to be ranked among the "Most Influential and majored Women in Bay Area Business for 2015" by San Francisco Business Times and was named the "2015 Woman of the Year" by Women Health Care Executives.
Physicians are an important part of health care in the United States. The vast majority of physicians in the US have a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree, though some have a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) or Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS).
Neel Shah is an American physician, Harvard University assistant professor, Chief Medical Officer of Maven Clinic, and founder of the nonprofit organizations Costs of Care and March for Moms. Shah is married to MIT Professor Julie Shah.
T. Brian Callister is an American physician who works on care transitions. He is a critic of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Callister was the National Medical Director, Chief Medical Officer and Senior Physician Executive at The LifeCare Family of Hospitals, a system of specialty care hospitals, from 2004 – 2016. He was an academic hospitalist and associate professor of internal medicine in Reno, Nevada. and is the governor-elect of Nevada for the American College of Physicians. Much of his work is focused on healthcare policy, quality improvement, and end-of-life issues.
Zubin Damania is an American physician, assistant professor, comedian, internet personality, and musician. He also has been writing and performing comedic raps as ZDoggMD, an internet celebrity known for his music videos, parodies, and comedy sketches about medical issues, as well as systemic issues with healthcare.
David Bates is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is internationally renowned for his work regarding the use of health information technology (HIT) to improve the safety and quality of healthcare, in particular by using clinical decision support. Bates has done work in the area of medication safety. He began by describing the epidemiology of harm caused by medications, first in hospitalized patients and then in other settings such as the home and nursing homes. Subsequently, he demonstrated that by implementing computerized physician order entry (CPOE), medication safety could be dramatically improved in hospitals. This work led the Leapfrog Group to call CPOE one of the four changes that would most improve the safety of U.S. healthcare. It also helped hospitals to justify investing in electronic health records and in particular, CPOE. Throughout his career, Bates has published over 600 peer reviewed articles and is the most cited researcher in the fields of both patient safety and biomedical informatics, with an h-index of 115. In a 2013 analysis published by the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, he ranked among the top 400 living biomedical researchers of any type. He is currently editor of the Journal of Patient Safety.
Post-Hospitalist Medicine is the discipline concerned with the medical care of patients residing in Post-Acute, Long-Term Care, Rehabilitation and Assisted Living Facilities. The Physicians whose primary professional focus is the post-hospital medical care of these patients are called Post-Hospitalists.
An obstetric hospitalist is an obstetrician and gynaecologist physician who is either employed by a hospital or a physician practice and whose duties include providing care for laboring patients and managing obstetric emergencies. Some obstetrics hospitalists also have responsibilities including resident and medical student teaching; providing backup support for family practitioners and nurse midwives, assisting private physicians with surgery, assuming care for ob-gyn patients unassigned to a physician and providing vacation coverage for the private practicing physician.
David Owen Meltzer is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago. He holds faculty appointments in the Department of Medicine, Department of Economics and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies. He is Chief of the Section of Hospital Medicine at the University of Chicago Medicine, and is the Director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences (CHeSS), as well as the Director of the Urban Health Lab in Chicago, IL. In 2015 he was appointed a member of the faculty for the forthcoming Barack Obama Presidential Center which will be located in Chicago's South Side.
Jacqueline Nwando Olayiwola is an American family physician, public health professional, author, professor, and women's empowerment leader. She is the Senior Vice President and Chief Health Equity Officer of Humana and a chair and Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Prior to her appointment at OSU, she served as the inaugural Chief Clinical Transformation Officer for RubiconMD, an eConsult platform that improves primary care access to specialty care for underserved patients. Olayiwola is dedicated to serving marginalized patient populations and addressing the social determinants through community and technology-based infrastructures of healthcare reform. She has published articles on the use of eConsults and telehealth to provide underserved patients with primary care treatments so that they have a low cost and efficient means of reaching specialized care. Olayiwola has founded numerous non-profits and healthcare start-ups such as GIRLTALK Inc, Inspire Health Solutions LLC, and the Minority Women Professionals are MVPs Program. She has been recognized at the national and international level for her work and efforts to educate, advocate and provide healthcare to those in need. She was named Woman of the Year by the American Telemedicine Association in 2019, and received the Public Health Innovator Award from Harvard School of Public Health in 2019, as well as being named one of America's Top Family Doctors from 2007 to 2008 by the Consumers Research Council of America.
In the domain of hospital medicine, interdisciplinary bedside rounds are a collaborative approach to patient care that involves the participation of the bedside nurse, primary provider, and the patient. They are often joined by family members and allied health professionals such as the patient's pharmacist and case manager.
