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Dr. Jill Waldman of Phelps Memorial Hospital Center Earns Senior Fellow in Hospital Medicine Designation

Designation Represents Years of Experience, Commitment to Patient Care in the Hospital

(June 8, 2012) Jill Waldman, MD, SFHM, has earned designation as a Senior Fellow in Hospital Medicine (SFHM) by the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM).

The 2012 class of Senior Fellow of Hospital Medicine designees represents hospital medicine’s most experienced leaders. To be designated, an applicant must serve as a hospitalist and be a member of the Society of Hospital Medicine for at least five years. Applicants must also demonstrate their dedication to quality and process improvement and commitment to organizational teamwork, leadership and lifelong learning.

Dr. Waldman was inducted into the 2012 class of Senior Fellows at the Society of Hospital Medicine’s annual meeting in San Diego, California on April 3, 2012.

The hospitalist program at Phelps has been in existence for 11 years but, under Dr. Waldman’s direction, the staff has grown to eight full-time physicians and six per-diem physicians.

Dr. Waldman is board certified in internal medicine and is an experienced hospitalist director and emergency medicine physician. She earned her medical degree at Brooklyn College-SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and completed a residency in internal medicine at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla. Dr. Waldman is a resident of South Salem, NY.

Hospitalists are residency-trained physicians who work full time in the hospital as partners with a patient’s primary care physician, providing patients with consistent care during their hospital stay. Because hospitalists are active in the hospital 24 hours a day, they help to shorten patient waiting times for specialist consultations and coordinate lab and diagnostic testing.

Hospitalists are familiar with the hospital and its systems and functions because the hospital is the primary focus of their practice. All of the full-time hospitalists at Phelps participate in hospital committees and quality improvement activities. With a hospitalist coordinating care in the hospital, the patient’s primary care physician is relieved of travel time back and forth between office and hospital, adding to the quality of care they can extend to patients seen in their offices.

The term “hospitalist” first appeared in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article by Drs. Robert Wachter and Lee Goldman. Hospitalist service has rapidly been gaining popularity over the last decade as doctors look to work within the managed care system and to ease the pressures of busy practices. The programs are known to contribute greatly to the overall quality of care and to enhance levels of patient satisfaction.

Representing the fastest growing specialty in modern healthcare, the Society of Hospital Medicine is the leading medical society for more than 31,000 hospitalists and their patients. SHM is dedicated to promoting the highest quality of care for all hospitalized patients and overall excellence in the practice of hospital medicine through quality improvement, education, advocacy and research. Over the past decade, studies have shown that hospitalists decrease patients’ length of stay, reduce hospital costs and readmission rates, and increase patient satisfaction. For more information about SHM, visit www.hospitalmedicine.org.