The Role of the Advanced Practice Provider and the Evolving Health Care Landscape.

As health care delivery in America evolves to meet new complex demands, hospital medicine (HM) has become one of the fastest-growing specialties.1 With expanding workforce needs, the role of the advanced practice provider (APP) has evolved to meet increasing inpatient demands. The addition of APPs to adult HM teams has been described in the literature dating back to the 1990s, revealing that APPs provide a significant portion of medical services in many different settings, including HM.2–4 Because less information is known about the role of APPs in pediatric hospital medicine (PHM), we seek to describe the current state of PHM APPs and the potential positive effects that collaboration between physicians and APPs may have on the care of hospitalized children. The health care workforce composition has been changing over the last several years in response to many factors, including resident work hour reductions and projected physician shortages.5 The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, which created an increased demand for primary care providers and offered incentives to expand APP training programs, has resulted in an increasing number …