The doctor in charge of your hospital care is probably someone you've never met. Four questions change that.

Every year, 36 million Americans — one in nine of us — are admitted to the hospital. And the physician running the show from check-in to discharge usually isn't the primary care doctor you know. It's a hospitalist: a physician who works only in the hospital, managing the care of admitted patients. Most people don't learn that until they're already in a hospital bed.

Dr. Clark Coler has seen hospital medicine from every side. The son of a small-town internist who made house calls with a black bag, trained at the Mayo Clinic where patients' humanity comes first, he became one of Seattle's first hospitalists when the movement launched in 1994 — and he's spent more than 30 years caring for patients at the most frig ...