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It is somewhat true that in IM, especially as a hospitalist there are times of the day you can go "autopilot" since most of your patients will be co-managed with other services (as long as you're working in a hospital with pretty much full subspecialty support and not a critical access hospital), and some of those patients on your list will be rocks and just dispo issues (and you pretty much write the same note every day and billing for some easy RVUs). But of course other patients will be sicker, though many of the sicker ones co-managed or primarily being managed by a specialist service (but the hospitalist is technically the primary team only by hospital policy/routine or because the other service doesn't admit patients). But as others have said there's annoying part of being a hospitalist as well including bein dumped on by specialists just because you're technically the primary team and something else isn't in their scope of practice, being stuck dealing with a lot of the dispo/ discharge planning stuff, or having to answer most of the nursing pages. Also unless your place has full time nocturnists you may need to work nights as well. Pay right now is around low to mid $300ks for daytime hospitalists for a standard 7on/7off (~182 shifts per year) schedule at a "non-academic" setting, which is decent but still less than the $400-500k you can make as a radiologist (though training time is twice as long and I suspect to make closer to $500k you would have to work longer hours than a typical 7on/7off hospitalists.
Agree that in radiology there's much less room for error and you can't B.S. your way through even a single image since it's all saved in the system forever and doesn't change. And with the high volumes and speed an attending radiologist is expected to read nowadays (and hospitals excepting 24/7 coverage so someone has to work the nights and weekends) it can be make attending life in radiology busier than being a radiology resident if you want to make around $500k or more starting out and there's probably a fairly high malpractice liability. If you think working that much as an attending radiologist will burn you out, as others have suggesting
With that being said I'm still not sure if it's worth it for you to switch at this point. Financially speaking IM hospitalists will probably end up ahead or similarly financially than specialists for most of early to mid career. While some specialists may make $100-200k more than IM, they are paying 38-45% of their additional earnings to taxes but also have to go though 6 years of training time instead of 3 yrs for IM. But since you're already a PGY-2 at this point and would have to restart IM residency at the PGY-1 year (since you did a TY year and not an IM prelim) doing general IM wouldn't benefit you in becoming an attending much sooner.
