His advice to young hospitalists who want to undertake research projects? Identify existing resources at their institution and find out how they can collaborate with other members of the healthcare team, including nurses and pharmacists.
Community-based hospitalists will most likely benefit, surmises Dr. Schnipper, from emerging initiatives for public reporting and pay for performance, an offshoot of which will yield more useful data sets. “I think they will probably do more collaborative research. Community hospitalists may not have fellowship training in research and protected time to become independent investigators with federal funding,” he says. “What they do have is incredible clinical insight and exact knowledge of the problems in their hospital. I would love to see more academic-community partnerships, where we could do studies in real-world hospitals, not just my ivory tower. Then, we could get some really good, generalizable, multi-center research – which would make everybody happy.” TH
Gretchen Henkel writes regularly for The Hospitalist.
References
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- Yealy DM, Auble TE, Stone RA, et al. Effect of increasing the intensity of implementing pneumonia guidelines: a randomized, controlled trial. Ann Intern Med. 2005 Dec 20;143(12):881-894.
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- The Society of Hospital Medicine 2005-2006 Survey. The Authoritative Source on the State of the Hospital Medicine Movement, May, 2006. Philadelphia.