McKean: Principles and Practice of Hospital Medicine

NOTE: This free app contains the first chapter to preview. Access to the complete title requires an in app purchase of $149.99.

The most authoritative and practical resource available on hospital medicine, in full color with coverage of key clinical procedures, self assessment/board review tools, and interviews with master clinicians on the pearls and pitfalls in the practice of hospital-medicine!

Hospital medicine is among the fastest growth categories in medicine ever. It has grown from a handful of clinicians in 1999 to a field expected to exceed 30,000 by 2010.

This growth has been fueled by the increasing complexity of modern health care. Hospitalists are general internal medicine physicians mostly, who help patients navigate the very complex clinical and administrative waters of the modern hospital. Because hospitals prefer to have as many patients as out-patients as possible, those patients who do require hospitalization tend to be the sickest of the sick, who require extraordinary amounts of care from many types of health professionals and specialists. Hospitalist physicians guide these patients through this maze, which is filled with many complexities and risks to patient safety and to healthy quality.
Principles and Practice of Hospital Medicine is the most innovative and authoritative resource available to the clinician. Prepared in a beautiful and effective full color format, the book guides readers through the clinical and organizational essentials necessary to practice hospital medicine. Using a large collection of tables, lists, algorithms, and key points, each chapter will presents real detail about all the critical topics in the specialty.

The diagnostic and management discussions are heavily evidence-based. Clinical chapters contain easy-to-read management algorithms. Unique features include sidebars on the performance measures that hospitalists must meet in the brave new world of pay-for-performance medicine (for example, appropriate antibiotics and pneumococcal vaccination for community-acquired pneumonia). There are sidebars in clinical chapters delineating areas of controversy and clinical uncertainty (for example, the role of race in the management of congestive heart failure or whether antibiotics should be used routinely in COPD exacerbations). Each chapter contains one or two clinical pearls; for example, tips on how to avoid use of the urinary tract catheter and prevent urinary tract infections, or how to eradicate the MRSA carrier state.

McGraw-Hill's Hospital Medicine differs from its competitors in three major respects: first, content that acknowledges that the practice of hospital medicine is distinct from general internal medicine; second, plentiful material geared toward board review and certification; third, the integration of numerous visual elements with lively textual features, including the generous use of sidebars and clinical pearls to make the text more reader-friendly.

Key Selling Features
Comprehensive: covers the full scope of clinical, organizational, and administrative issues in hospital medicine practice
Full color: design and illustrations will guide the reader through the key points of each chapter

Self Assessment and Board Review Q&A: in anticipation of hospital medicine becoming its own certified specialty of medicine.

Evidence-based: chapters and practice guidelines and treatment recommendations are based on carefully analyzed and applied levels of evidence

About the Author
Sylvia McKean MD (Boston, MA) is Professor of Medicine, Harvard University School of Medicine, and Chief of the Hospitalist Service at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. She was head of the committee within the Society for Hospital Medicine that drafted and finalized the official Hospital Medicine curriculum endorsed by SHM. She is assembling a world class team of authors and contributors for this book.