Dan Dressler, MD, MSc, FHM, was introduced to the hospitalist concept a decade ago during a breakout session at a Society of General Internal Medicine meeting. A resident at the time, Dressler immediately latched on to the HM concept.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this is interesting. There are a lot of fun, exciting people,’ ” he says. “I thought they had a great vision for medicine. It was the direction I wanted to go.”
Dr. Dressler joined SHM in 2000. Now he supervises the nation’s largest academic hospitalist program and is one of SHM’s newest board members. He officially joined the 12-member board at HM09 in Chicago and will serve a three-year term.
Now the director of education for the section of hospital medicine, associate professor and associate residency director in the department of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Dressler has a passion for teaching, evidence-based medicine, and quality initiatives. He’s worked in academic and community hospital settings; he’s served on SHM’s Education Committee; and he’s chaired SHM’s Core Competencies task force. “I have a huge interest in education,” Dr. Dressler says, adding he will serve as the course director for HM11 in Dallas.
His mission is to make sure all hospitalists across the country have the same baseline skills. “I consider this a new opportunity, a new challenge,” he says. “I believe SHM is a high-level, high-quality organization. It’s a group that is going to lead medicine.”