At age 6, Adam Singer spent hours walking the halls of a Los Angeles hospital owned by his father, a physician. He probably did not realize it at the time, but his adult career would ultimately capitalize on the nexus between those two worlds—that of doctor and hospital—and would contribute to the formation of a new medical specialty.
Today, at 48, Singer, M.D., is the chairman, chief executive officer and chief medical officer of IPC-The Hospitalist Co., North Hollywood, Calif., which he founded in 1995 and took public this past January. He can also be counted among a handful of individuals who helped launch and shape the specialty of hospital medicine, which has been growing by leaps and bounds since the mid-1990s when the term “hospitalist” was first coined.
IPC has some 1,200 employees, including more than 800 affiliated physicians providing care in more than 300 facilities in 18 states. Fresh from a fellowship at the LAC-University of Southern California Medical Center, Los Angeles, and struggling to attract patients to his fledgling pulmonology practice in 1991, Singer responded to an ad for an internist to do the inpatient work for a large independent practice association.
After signing the contract, he went overnight from managing no patients to managing some 30,000 and was soon seeing 20 to 30 patients a day. He started to think that his practice, with physicians dedicated solely to the care of hospitalized patients, was more efficient than the old-style primary-care model under which doctors traveled between their office and the hospital to see patients.
“We realized we were onto something that was going to be a lot better for everyone,” Singer says. He soon began pondering how to leverage his personal experience into a larger-scale operation.
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