The Role of Hospitalists in Biocontainment Units: A Perspective

Eligibility criteria for HITeam hospitalists include complete initial and quarterly maintenance PPE training; possession of active bedside procedure credentials for at least central line, paracentesis, thoracentesis, and arterial line; demonstration of basic POCUS skills, such as having enough POCUS verbiage literacy to be able to follow a radiologist’s instructions on probe management (ie, a radiologist outside anteroom); and possibility of completing additional training and credentialing on conscious sedation and/or advanced airway management.

Similarly, hospitalists who join the team commit to attendance of at least one National Ebola Training and Education Center (NETEC) provider’s course, representing the Region 8 RESPTC for educational presentations and research at regional and national levels, participation in quarterly HISP multidisciplinary meetings, attendance at quarterly donning and doffing sessions, as well as HITeam training sessions and drills, and active participation in the every-other-month HISP Journal Club/Grand Rounds to maintain competence and knowledge on management of many different pathogens, including Ebola and other filoviruses, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, Arenaviruses causing hemorrhagic fevers, Hantavirus, and novel influenzas or coronaviruses.

All of these commitments provide HITeam hospitalists with multiple opportunities for professional growth and development, such as augmenting scholarship venues by participating in collaborative national research projects, participating in national topic networks discussion groups and committees, becoming topic experts, and engaging in diversified training such as advanced airway training and conscious sedation. A new bedside ultrasound machine was purchased for the unit and housed within the division of hospital medicine with the intent to provide hospitalists the means necessary to achieve POCUS proficiency. Above all, by fostering a highly motivated and collegial multidisciplinary team, our model helps develop lasting partnerships at an institutional, regional, and national level.

This multidisciplinary team—with its skillfully trained and engaged nurses, physicians, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, infection control and laboratory specialists—works, learns, trains, and thrives collectively with the aim of providing excellent clinical care to our patients while assuring the safety of the team. DHHA has pioneered a RESPTC physician staffing model led by hospitalists.

We live in an ever-changing landscape of emerging diseases with blurred borders of disease geography. Hospitalists are versatile, capable of managing patients of varying acuity, able to perform many bedside procedures and POCUS; they are champions of interdisciplinary and teamwork disposition. By utilizing the resourcefulness of hospital medicine while helping to ease some of the burden that might otherwise be placed on a smaller numbers of physician groups, this approach provides a unique, cost-effective, and viable physician staffing model, which could be implemented in other BCUs in the United States.