SHM is excited to announce the publication of the 2025 State of Hospital Medicine Report. The Report, based on data from 2024, is a snapshot of what is happening across hospital medicine groups. We retained much of the traditional data groups rely on and added new questions relevant to this ever-changing environment. The Report provides valuable insights into the specialty of hospital medicine.
More Hospitalists but Fewer Groups in the Data
Continuing the trend shown in the last several iterations of the Report, groups are growing. Almost 11,000 FTE physician hospitalists are represented in the data, nearly double the number of 2012. The median group size in 2025 for adult hospitalists was 26.9, and for pediatric hospitalists it was 15.3. Because the groups are larger than ever, we included a new category for Group Size in the Report, since we know that the largest groups operate differently from smaller groups.
Although the number of hospitalists increased, the number of groups represented in the data decreased. While there may be some oversampling of larger groups, this could be an indicator of a growth trend for these groups and/or consolidation within hospital medicine. This observation corresponds with frequent anecdotal feedback from committees and members, and reflects the broader trends of consolidation within the healthcare system.
To further explore this, we identified groups that had previously participated to see if they also showed signs of expansion. We looked at 62 groups that participated in 2020 and compared them to their data in 2025. Eight of these groups shrank in size, six remained the same, and 48 grew. On average, these groups increased in size by 9.1 FTE physicians, or a 40% increase. We will look for ways to explore this in future Reports.
Valuable Insights into Hospital Medicine
The Report provides valuable and useful insights into the specialty of hospital medicine. The number of NPs and PAs remained steady in adult groups but continued to increase in groups serving pediatric patients. We added new questions about the roles and structures of NPs and PAs, including scheduling patterns, compensation breakdowns, and roles in leadership.
In addition to the compensation and productivity data licensed from the Medical Group Management Association that’s included in the Report, we expanded our SoHM compensation and billing data to include the frequency that compensation plans are benchmarked, and expanded the question on compensation breakdowns so we can now report on daytime and nocturnist physicians, as well as NPs and PAs. The Report includes data on 18 common nonproduction performance incentives and whether they are used in the assessment of individual hospitalists, the group, or both.
The Report included questions that measure some of the ever-expanding roles that hospitalists have in their organizations. The results include information on new co-management specialties, such as trauma and urology, novel and expanding scopes of practice that groups lead or participate in, such as telemedicine and post-acute care. The Report also included a brand-new question on how structures, strategies, and initiatives that hospital medicine programs employ to address challenges with emergency department boarding.
A Challenge for Hospital Medicine
We know that many readers of the Report use the data found within as a benchmark. It is a great resource for measuring and comparing operations internally over time and externally to other organizations’ experiences. We encourage readers of the Report to read the Introduction, particularly “Using the Survey Report,” to understand how best to compare their data to that in the SoHM. We also suggest survey participants compare how they responded to questions to the results in the Report, giving them a picture of where their group stands.
Due to the group-level nature of the Report, the results don’t include many metrics that we know hospitalists themselves value. But there are a few data points we can tie into the priorities and needs of hospitalists, and here we see that the Report should not be used as a benchmark, but as a call to action.
As reported 2024 Hospital Medicine Workforce Experience Report, fewer than a quarter of hospitalists met the criteria for professional fulfillment, and 45% met the criteria for burnout. At the same time, the Report found that supportive leadership substantially improves scores. However, there was no improvement in the 2025 SoHM on questions of whether groups measured well-being and burnout or if they had an employee with a non-clinical focus on well-being, engagement, and burnout. The Hospital Medicine Workforce Experience Report also found that time off and PTO access are important tools in combating burnout. While the 2025 SoHM showed an increase in the proportion of groups offering PTO, it is still not the majority.
There are many other challenges we face and obstacles to overcome in hospital medicine and medicine as a whole. We hope this State of Hospital Medicine Report gives readers the data they need to make informed decisions in the coming year, to advance and streamline operations in groups across the country, and improve care for hospitalized patients. In addition, SHM’s Practice Management Department plans to weave SoHM data insights into articles and new programming and resources on pressing issues for the field throughout the year.