Take readmissions. There is a lot of dyspepsia swirling around this issue, and it’s clear that we have to reduce them. In fact, without such reductions, our hospitals (and likely us) won’t get paid. How will we do that? Maybe Project RED, maybe Project BOOST, maybe the best solution hasn’t been found yet. We don’t know, and we won’t until academic hospitalists have studied it.
Moreover, if we don’t present learners with talented, satisfied, respected hospitalist role models, I guarantee you that the quantity and quality of residents graduating to academic and community HM programs will suffer. Think back to those people who lured you into your specialty. Were you inspired to pediatrics, family medicine, or internal medicine because you saw those providers toiling away unsated by themselves on the wards?
Academic HM has a problem. And we are working toward the solution.
Six months ago, 90 academic hospitalist leaders convened in Washington, D.C., for the first Academic Hospital Medicine Leadership Summit. The goal was to develop a vision and action plan for the future of academic HM. Three work groups tackled the research, educational, and clinical issues facing our field. The recommendations of these sessions were then transferred to SHM’s Academic Committee and its subcommittees for operationalization.
A Pipeline of Quality
The education work group identified a need to establish hospitalists as the teachers of quality and safety for students and residents. This included increasing the number of hospitalists in such educational leadership positions as program and clerkship directors, where they can visibly lead the educational infrastructure. In response, SHM will unfurl the Quality and Safety Educators Academy this spring with the goal of providing academic hospitalists the construct to teach quality and safety.
Additionally, SHM’s Education Committee is developing a “plug and play” quality-improvement (QI) curriculum for use by any hospitalist educator. These initiatives will build on the success of the Academic Hospitalist Academy, developed two years ago to provide early career direction to academic hospitalists.
The education work group also prioritized the development of a strong pipeline of interest in HM starting at the medical-student level. This recommendation was turned over to the newly minted Pipeline Committee, which has been working feverishly to develop and expand medical student Hospital Medicine Interest Groups, the development of HM residency tracks, and an extension of our partnerships with other educational groups.
Answers to Future Questions
On the research front, goals were set to better develop and support clinician-researchers. This includes better delineating HM core research strengths, devising methods to partner with other medical subspecialties to perform quality and safety research in their areas of content expertise, and to develop a pipeline of future researchers.
To this last point, SHM awarded its first set of $50,000 research awards to two burgeoning researchers earlier this year.
SHM also is partnering with the Association of Specialty Professors to offer career development grants in geriatric medicine through the new Grants for Early Medical and Surgical Subspecialists’ Transitions to Aging Research (GEMSSTAR) program. And for the rest of us, SHM has devised free, Web-based forums for young researchers to present their work to their peers nationally.
Productivity, Efficiency, and Promotion
On the clinical side, the needs addressed include identification of benchmarks for academic clinical productivity, pathways for academic promotion, a methodology to garner more support for nonclinical work, and expectations to improve workflow and efficiency in academic medical centers.
These important tasks were assigned to a newly created Academic Practice and Promotions Task Force. This group is actively developing a quantitative survey to evaluate these needs and plans to publish a white paper of their findings, along with recommendations for hospitalist program directors, their department chairs and deans, and the hospitals that fund their programs. The findings will be presented at the next summit—at HM11 on May 10, 2011, in Dallas—as we continue to chart the course for success in academic hospital medicine.