Danielle Scheurer, MD, MSCR, SFHM, has her sights set on quality improvement when it comes to serving on SHM’s Board of Directors over the next three years. As a representative of a society she considers well managed and efficient, Dr. Scheurer plans to continue fulfilling the goals she set for herself when she began her career in hospital medicine.
“I realized very quickly that I was not going to be satisfied being a good doctor with individual patients because of the barriers to good care and became compelled to attack the issues at the system level,” says Dr. Scheurer, who also serves as physician editor of The Hospitalist.
After earning a medical degree from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and completing a dual residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at Duke University in Durham, N.C., Dr. Scheurer immersed herself in patient-centered care practices as a hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston from 2005 to 2010. She continues to stress the importance of quality in her current role as chief quality officer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
Since becoming involved with SHM in 2003, Dr. Scheurer has spent time educating hospitalists on tactics to make hospital systems more effective and she blogs about clinical and practice issues. Dr. Scheurer also serves on SHM’s Education Committee, a role that she plans to continue in tandem with her work on the board.
Dr. Scheurer’s hard work for the society not gone unnoticed. SHM President Burke T. Kealey, MD, SFHM, notes, “I’m very pleased to have Danielle on the board with us. I think she is going to add a great voice. Danielle has already been a great contributor to SHM. She has done a great job of getting out the message about SHM to our members and to others.”
One of Dr. Scheurer’s biggest accomplishments has been her role developing medical knowledge modules on quality and patient safety for the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Recognition in Focused Practice in Hospital Medicine maintenance of certification (MOC) program. She has presented numerous MOC pre-courses at SHM’s annual meetings. She says her involvement with fledgling hospitalists has made her optimistic about the future of the specialty.
“People in hospital medicine are already very focused on quality,” she says. “We are getting better at understanding that it’s not just about being a good doctor, its about creating systems that can effectively and reliably deliver high-quality care.”