Rationale. It would not be desirable or feasible to use a conventional parallel group randomized trial for at least two reasons: 1) With new hires, the number of hospitalists will increase substantially over the study period, and a fixed allocation of patients (e.g., the usual 1:1 ratio) to the hospitalist and general pediatrics services throughout the study would not efficiently use these faculty; 2) Random assignment of patients would be difficult to implement, might result in unacceptable imbalances in the number of patients assigned to the 4 different hospitalist or general pediatric teams, and would intrude on current routines and likely be resisted by the hospital administration.