For hospitalists, SHM’s annual meeting is more than an educational conference; it’s an extended family reunion. And with HM12 located in sunny San Diego, the next meeting is a conference, vacation, and family reunion wrapped into one.
Like other family reunions, members of the HM family come to connect with others, catch up on recent experiences, and learn from each other.
“I’m really looking forward to the people,” says HM12 course director Jeff Glasheen, MD, SFHM, associate professor of medicine and director of the hospital medicine group at the University of Colorado Denver. “I attend a lot of CME meetings, and the one thing that sets HM12 apart is the people. It’s a chance for me to reconnect with old friends and make future old friends.”
For hospitalists who are new to SHM or considering going to their first annual meeting, Dr. Glasheen says the experience will be pivotal.
“There simply isn’t a better way to network, learn, and re-energize than coming to the annual meeting,” he says. “I can guarantee first-time attendees will find the annual meeting career-altering. I did, nine years ago, and I hear from new attendees every year that it happens for them as well.”
Registration is open at www.hospitalmedicine2012.org.
There simply isn’t a better way to network, learn, and re-energize than coming to the annual meeting. I can guarantee first-time attendees will find the annual meeting career-altering.
—Jeffrey Glasheen, MD, SFHM, HM12 course director
HM12: Off the Beaten Path
In recent years, SHM has presented educational content at the annual meeting in a series of tracks: clinical, academic, pediatric, evidence-based rapid fire, workshops, practice management, and quality. Those tracks help hospitalists identify the courses that will be most pertinent to their careers and daily life.
HM12 introduces a new innovation to the content: pathways. Not all courses fit squarely into the categories presented into the tracks, so pathways give hospitalists the chance to identify the most relevant talks from the different tracks.
To illustrate the pathways concept, Dr. Glasheen uses the example of a hospitalist who is interested in quality improvement (QI). Although there is a quality track, there are quality and safety presentations throughout the conference. The quality pathway will quickly allow the attendee to identify these out of the myriad talks contained in the four-day meeting.”
“Additionally, if you are a nurse practitioner or interested in palliative care, you’ll be able to choose the NP or palliative-care pathway to immediately identify the sessions that might be most applicable to you,” he says. “You don’t have to go to only those sessions, but the pathways will serve as an easy reference to identify the areas of most interest to you.”
And, in recognition of the broad spectrum of nonclinical topics that hospitalists cover, HM12 will present a “potpourri” track for the first time. This track will help round out the meeting by offering such nonclinical topics as “The History of Hospitals,” “Using Art to Improve Your Clinical Observation Skills,” and “Professionalism in the Digital Age”—topics that will help make the meeting, and hospitalists, more holistic.
Improvements aren’t limited to courses, either. HM12 organizers have split the popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) poster session into two sessions: one for research and innovations, the other for vignettes. Organizers say this will allow RIV participants more time to review the hundreds of posters presented at the annual meeting.
“We’ve heard the feedback that there just wasn’t enough time to get to the hundreds of posters that were presented at last year’s meeting,” Dr. Glasheen says. “By splitting this into two different sessions, we think this will make the poster sessions that much stronger.”