The “Hospitalist Career Options” education session provided future and early-career hospitalists with information about the diversity of potential career tracks within hospital medicine.
“There are so many different things that people do and that’s what so amazing about hospital medicine,” said Dennis Chang, MD, FHM, associate professor in Mount Sinai Hospital’s division of hospital medicine, New York, in his talk on Monday. “You never really know where its going to go, and it’s really a matter of keeping your eye out for opportunities.”
Dr. Dennis Chang
Hospital medicine offers a diverse and interesting career that presents a variety of professional opportunities to those who practice it, Dr. Chang said. He noted that many hospitalists are gravitating toward careers in improving patient safety and quality improvement.
“They are working on the systems that are in the hospital and trying to make them more efficient and safer for patients,” he said.
Keeping with the theme of the talk, Dr. Chang pointed out that there a number of other specialty areas that hospitalists can explore.
“A lot of hospitalists also get into education, educating students and residents,” he said. If teaching is not your desired area of practice, you can also try your hand at “becoming CMO [chief medical officer] of a hospital” or other areas of administrative leadership or “informatics and electronic health records.” Most importantly, there are a variety of professional avenues available within hospital medicine, he added.
Dr. Chang said that the design of the session was intended to help early-career hospitalists navigate their professional path and indicated that it definitely would have provided him with some guidance. “When I was a resident thinking about what I wanted to do after residency, I didn’t necessarily know what hospital medicine was,” he said. “I think I thought it was a cool clinical job, but I didn’t understand that there were so many other things that you could do with it that are not clinical, but still really interesting.”
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