In July 2006, the Department of Critical Care Medicine launched the hospitalist division with four internal medicine physicians. The first project was to provide around the clock inpatient services at UPMC South Side. These services include inpatient hospital primary care, rapid response team, stroke team, performing procedures, and review of all admission orders for medical appropriateness. Over the past two years the South Side Hospital has shown a decreased length of stay and decreased cost per case.

Beginning in August 2008, the hospitalist program expanded to ten doctors and assumed the hospitalist functions at UPMC Braddock and at UPMC Passavant. Currently, the UPMC South Side hospitalist program will be merging with the existing hospitalist program at UPMC Mercy.  By July of 2009, the Hospitalists Division is expected to have a total of twenty physicians.

The hospitalists receive special training in conjunction with the critical care staff in airway management, mechanical ventilation, stroke management, crisis team management, and other topics in critical care medicine.

The vision of the Division of Hospital Medicine is to consolidate and standardize hospitalist services throughout the UPMC System and to develop a model for collaboration with the critical care faculty in caring for inpatients at UPMC.