LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Abstract

In Reply:—Dr. Khaliq and colleagues compare hospitalist and nonhospitalist care using grouped data from two distinctly different patient care services (teaching and nonteaching) without any discussion or adjustment for important factors such as how patients or physicians were assigned to each service. Without this kind of discussion and adjustment for confounding factors it is impossible to draw any conclusions on how hospitalist and nonhospitalist care differs in their hospital. In addition, it is certainly not possible to use these data to suggest that the established literature on the beneficial impact of hospitalists is somehow brought into question.