US Physicians with Recent Experience Managing Hospitalized Older Adults: an Observational Study

Excerpt

The number of COVID-19 cases in the USA surged from zero to 1.7 million between February and May 2020.¹ With predicted hospitalization rates as high as 20%,^{2, 3} many hospitals ramped up staffing by deploying physicians to the front lines.⁴ However, little is known about the supply of physicians potentially available to manage hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Over the past 20 years, US healthcare delivery shifted from predominantly facility-based to ambulatory clinic-based services, with some physicians no longer treating hospitalized patients. As hospitals face the COVID-19 pandemic, an assessment of demographics and practice characteristics of physicians likely to be deployed could inform resource allocation. For example, given elevated risk of severe disease among older adults,² hospitals may not want to deploy older physicians to provide direct patient care. Our objectives were to (1) describe the characteristics of physicians with recent experience managing hospitalized patients, and (2) measure regional prevalence of these physicians across hospital service areas (HSAs)⁵. …