By Matt Leingang
Enquirer staff writer

Christ Hospital is believed to be the first community hospital in Greater Cincinnati to deploy full-time specialists to care for critically ill patients.

These doctors - called "intensivists - are trained to look for signs of infection, organ failure and other life-threatening complications before they can affect patients in the intensive care unit.

Recent studies say that intensivist-led ICUs can reduce patient death rates and save as many as 162,000 lives a year.

Yet only 10 percent of hospitals nationwide employ full-time intensivists, mainly because there is a shortage.

Also, not all hospital administrators agree that full-time intensivists are necessary, opting instead for part-time staffing or an on-call system. Then there are turf wars. Some doctors might be reluctant to turn their patients, fresh out of major surgery, over to someone else.

Christ Hospital has four certified intensivists. Each is also a pulmonary doctor in private practice. Prior to this month, they worked at the Christ Hospital ICU part time.

"We've made the commitment so that an intensivist will always be in charge," said Dr. Mark Scott, an intensivist and director of Christ Hospital's ICU, which has 14 beds and cares for about 1,000 patients a year.

Scott said intensivists won't replace the roles of other specialists involved in a patient's care, such as cardiologists. Rather, the idea is to act as a coordinator - managing a patient's medicines and help setting care priorities.

Pressure to improve intensive care is coming from the Leapfrog Group, a consortium of Fortune 500 companies, including Procter & Gamble, who buy health care for their employees.

Mandatory use of intensivists is one of the group's key measures by which it rates hospitals, although that's hardly the only barometer of ICU quality, critics say.

Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, which has two part-time intensivists, is considering a switch to full-time status, said spokesman Joe Kelley.

Intensivist-led critical care units are more common in pediatric hospitals than adult hospitals. The ICU at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center has seven supervising physicians, all of whom are certified intensivists.

E-mail mleingang@enquirer.com