At the very least, find out how often, and in what way, the hospitalist is in contact with your primary-care doctor while you're in the hospital. When you leave, ask if the hospitalist will be contacting your doctor. Make sure the responsibility of care is returned to a fully informed family doctor. There will always be something lost when a patient's care transfers from one physician to the next. In the case of hospitalists, the hope is that what patients lose in long-term familiarity, they'll gain in availability.
Every hospital has a staff of physicians who, in rotation, are on call.
Each physician might be on call once a month, and those with the busiest practices have long given their call duties to other physicians, along with appropriate compensation. Other doctors, perhaps still paying off medical school bills, might try to take as much call duty as they can get to supplement their incomes. It has been a patchwork system with few incentives for efficiency or quality of care. In addition, some primary-care doctors, with fewer patients hospitalized and more patients in their office waiting rooms, figured it was more efficient to pay other doctors to take over their hospital rounds. Thus hospitalist programs, groups of doctors willing to take on the hospital care, were born.