New study predicts future trends in HIV care

As individuals who are diagnosed with HIV - a currently incurable sexually transmitted disease (STD) - are living longer due to the advances in therapies that keep the virus at bay, their care needs are expected to change. In fact, a new study suggests that the care of these patients is expected to shift to hospitalists in the coming years, according to TheHospitalist.org.

Hospitalist medicine is an emerging profession that includes physicians with general medical training who focus on, and coordinate, inpatient care.

"Hospitalists are going to be doing more and more of the HIV care because we have a growing population of aging patients who are in care or identify as being HIV-positive, and they're not coming in with exotic or unusual opportunistic infections," said Rich MacKay, director of the inpatient HIV service at New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center, quoted by the news source.

He added that this means that hospitalists should make sure they are familiar with HIV symptoms and treatments in order to be able to provide the best care for affected patients. These doctors should also perform routine HIV screenings of hospitalized individuals, which could save these patients' lives in the long run.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that at the end of 2006, some 1.1 million people in the U.S. were living with HIV, and 21 percent of them went undiagnosed.