The rise of the medical specialty known as hospital medicine in recent years has meant that fewer non-hospitalists spend time caring for their patients in hospitals.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has changed that temporarily, as hospitals call upon physicians of many specialties to care for hospitalized patients with coronavirus infections or to cover the care of other patients while hospitalists focus on COVID-19 patients. 

And it's not just internal medicine physicians and residents, either. Surgeons, ophthalmologists, psychiatrists, outpatient nurse practitioners and physician assistants, other types of residents and newly graduated medical students are also getting pulled into COVID-19 care, or covering for other providers, in some cities.

A newly free online reference book could help them all. The Saint-Chopra Guide to Inpatient Medicine, written by two hospitalists from the University of Michigan and VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, with chapters by many experts from U-M and beyond, is now available without charge from Oxford University Press.

Now in its fourth edition, the book by Sanjay Saint, M.D., M.P.H., and Vineet Chopra, M.D., M.Sc., was originally written as a resource and framework for diagnosing and treating patients who require hospitalization. As they write in the preface, it is meant to provide "an overview of a topic when the reader has only a few minutes to read something before evaluating a patient or to prepare to discuss a clinical problem before rounds."

Chopra is the chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Michigan Medicine, U-M's academic medical center. Saint is the chief of medicine at the VAAHS and a professor of medicine at U-M.

In addition, University of Michigan experts are offering free CME courses on COVID-19 care.