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At the 2018 annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine – running from April 8 to 11 in Orlando – the theme could well be “in with the new, and in with the new.”
Planners for Hospital Medicine 2018 (HM18) have managed to pack the conference with five new tracks: Great Debate, Nurse Practitioner/Physician’s Assistant (NP/PA), Palliative Care, Seasoning Your Career, and a new Career Development workshop track. And they did this while eliminating only one track that was on the schedule last year – technology – and without adding any extra days to the meeting.
“We decided, since there were a bunch of themes that we really wanted to cover, we would do half-day tracks. The shorter tracks are also a way to gauge interest in a topic without making a big commitment to it,” Dr. Finn said. “The grouping of topics in smaller tracks in the Day-at-a-Glance helps people easily see a collection of lectures or a theme they might want to attend.”
While choosing themes for the meeting, the planners were trying to stay true to their own theme: timeliness.
“There’s pressure to make it a very relevant meeting,” Dr. Finn said. “We really want to have our finger on the pulse of what practicing hospitalists need and want to know and what is important to them. All the members of the committee feel very invested in figuring out: What is timely? What do we want to talk about right now? What are the active discussions and issues going on in health care that affect us in our practice?”
Assistant course director Dustin Smith, MD, FHM, an associate professor of medicine at Emory University, Atlanta, said much of the information for this year’s meeting came from the 2017 annual meeting, including attendance at sessions, speaker reviews, and session ratings.
“It’s building on momentum from the previous meeting,” he said. “Sometimes we choose things to offer that we know are going to go well, and sometimes we choose things that we hope go well, and all of a sudden we see [that they] go very, very well.” For instance, he said, the topic of sepsis was so popular last year that it has its own precourse this year.
The data on which the HM18 program is built doesn’t stop there. The 23 members of the planning committee – chosen strategically to represent a wide geographic range and array of practice types – all bring their own thoughts and experiences, as well as input from colleagues at their own centers. Then there are the submissions for workshop topics: Any SHM member can submit an idea, and – while just a few are chosen – those ideas help organizers see patterns of interest that can affect the planning of the rest of the sessions.
Here are more details on the new tracks:
Great debate
The annual meeting has traditionally had a “Great Debate” on perioperative medicine, but the format – with carefully chosen speakers who are dynamic and entertaining – will be used to cover pulmonary medicine and infectious diseases this year as well.
“It’s a hugely successful talk,” Dr. Finn said. “We can tell by our numbers that lots of people go, and it’s always funny, and it’s a very clever way of discussing the latest literature – by having two very dynamic speakers present a case and then debate the two options of the case and then use the literature to support the answer,” she said.
The hope is that the format will be more than just entertaining but will be an effective teaching tool, too.
“We think the high level of engagement and format of the talk leads to better overall education for those who attend,” Dr. Smith said.
NP/PA
This track includes topics chosen by the committee for advanced practice professionals.
“There are many hospitalist programs that include NP/PAs – this is what came through in all the feedback – and everybody is struggling with how do you best incorporate NPs and PAs into the group practice and have everybody work at the top of their license and work well together,” Dr. Finn said.
“The idea, too, is to be very inclusive of all providers and offering a track that focuses on NP/PAs but also includes physicians, physician leaders, and physician administrators,” Dr. Smith said. “It’s not designed for one type of practicing professional; it should be a good educational track for all.”
Palliative care
This was a topic that had been sprinkled throughout programs in previous years, but Dr. Finn and Dr. Smith said it was considered too important not to have its own track this year.
“I think hospitalists are often the doctors caring for patients at the end of their lives since many Americans die in the hospital,” Dr. Finn said. “So as a result, this is a skill set that as hospitalists we need to be very good at.”
Seasoning your career
This is a track geared toward one of this year’s themes: With “hospital medicine” now a concept that’s more than two decades old, how do hospitalists keep up the momentum in their careers, how do they take stock, how do they make the important decisions they face as they move ahead in their jobs?
“Hospital medicine is now over 20 years old – many hospitalists are now mid-career,” Dr. Finn said. “We picked an entire track on ‘seasoning your career’ to offer people ideas and skills to reflect on and rethink their career. Do you want to expand what you’re doing? Do you want to change it? How do you make this a lifelong career?”
Career development
There have always been workshops with a ‘career development’ focus, but this year six of them were chosen to be placed under the heading of an official “career development” workshop track.
“When you review the Day-at-a-Glance schedule, it really demarcates it,” Dr. Smith said. “This really helps attendees be able to quickly look through and find where they want to be for their next session.”
“Are there other skills you want to take on for the second half of your career?” Dr. Finn said. “Do you want to take on leadership? Do you want to learn how to better give your peers feedback? Do you want to promote women in your group? Do you want to prevent burnout or use emotional intelligence to improve your career? We cohorted these topics together.”
Aside from the new tracks, the course directors also drew attention to other new elements of the HM18 program.
For instance there are new topics in the Rapid Fire sessions. In the “Managing the patient on your service: Appendicitis, Bowel and biliary obstruction” session, a general surgeon will talk about how to manage these surgical issues when the patient is on a medical service. In “Interventional radiology: What every hospitalist needs to know,” an interventional radiologist will discuss when hospitalists may want to call in an interventional radiologist or refer to a hospital that has an interventional radiologist. And “Vulnerable populations and hospitalists” will continue with the theme of social determinants of health that was highlighted at last year’s meeting by keynote speaker Karen DeSalvo, MD, the national coordinator for health information technology.
Dr. Smith said that the program committee directors work with the Rapid Fire presenters so that the three or four questions discussed in the sessions are what attendees will want to learn most.
“We take an additional step: Once we recruit the speaker and have identified the topic, we have members of our committee work with the speakers,” he said.
“We don’t want them to come and give us an esoteric talk in an area that interests them. We want them to answer the clinical questions that hospitalists have,” Dr. Finn added.
Dr. Finn and Dr. Smith also highlighted sessions with a twist. For example, “Stupefy: EKGs for fun” is a session about EKGs that encourages hospitalists to “just go have fun reading them,” Dr. Finn said, while “Voldemort is on the plane: Airplane emergencies,” is scheduled for the final day of the conference, just before everyone flies back home.
As for catchy Disney-influenced titles, such as “The Mad Hatter: Updates in delirium” and “Waiting in line for ‘It’s a Small World’ and other things we do for no reason,” part of the credit can go to Dr. Finn’s niece. She said she “hired” her to come up with a list of Disney, Pixar, and Harry Potter movies and catchphrases. Then the committee worked them into the session titles.
Dr. Smith joked that part of his role was to veto some titles that were “a bit too cringe-worthy.”
“The theme of Orlando is making people happy,” Dr. Finn said. “One of the goals – the hopes – for me for at this meeting is that people bring their inner child and get curious again and explore new ideas and new topics and new career possibilities.”
At the 2018 annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine – running from April 8 to 11 in Orlando – the theme could well be “in with the new, and in with the new.”
Planners for Hospital Medicine 2018 (HM18) have managed to pack the conference with five new tracks: Great Debate, Nurse Practitioner/Physician’s Assistant (NP/PA), Palliative Care, Seasoning Your Career, and a new Career Development workshop track. And they did this while eliminating only one track that was on the schedule last year – technology – and without adding any extra days to the meeting.
“We decided, since there were a bunch of themes that we really wanted to cover, we would do half-day tracks. The shorter tracks are also a way to gauge interest in a topic without making a big commitment to it,” Dr. Finn said. “The grouping of topics in smaller tracks in the Day-at-a-Glance helps people easily see a collection of lectures or a theme they might want to attend.”
While choosing themes for the meeting, the planners were trying to stay true to their own theme: timeliness.
“There’s pressure to make it a very relevant meeting,” Dr. Finn said. “We really want to have our finger on the pulse of what practicing hospitalists need and want to know and what is important to them. All the members of the committee feel very invested in figuring out: What is timely? What do we want to talk about right now? What are the active discussions and issues going on in health care that affect us in our practice?”
Assistant course director Dustin Smith, MD, FHM, an associate professor of medicine at Emory University, Atlanta, said much of the information for this year’s meeting came from the 2017 annual meeting, including attendance at sessions, speaker reviews, and session ratings.
“It’s building on momentum from the previous meeting,” he said. “Sometimes we choose things to offer that we know are going to go well, and sometimes we choose things that we hope go well, and all of a sudden we see [that they] go very, very well.” For instance, he said, the topic of sepsis was so popular last year that it has its own precourse this year.
The data on which the HM18 program is built doesn’t stop there. The 23 members of the planning committee – chosen strategically to represent a wide geographic range and array of practice types – all bring their own thoughts and experiences, as well as input from colleagues at their own centers. Then there are the submissions for workshop topics: Any SHM member can submit an idea, and – while just a few are chosen – those ideas help organizers see patterns of interest that can affect the planning of the rest of the sessions.
Here are more details on the new tracks:
Great debate
The annual meeting has traditionally had a “Great Debate” on perioperative medicine, but the format – with carefully chosen speakers who are dynamic and entertaining – will be used to cover pulmonary medicine and infectious diseases this year as well.
“It’s a hugely successful talk,” Dr. Finn said. “We can tell by our numbers that lots of people go, and it’s always funny, and it’s a very clever way of discussing the latest literature – by having two very dynamic speakers present a case and then debate the two options of the case and then use the literature to support the answer,” she said.
The hope is that the format will be more than just entertaining but will be an effective teaching tool, too.
“We think the high level of engagement and format of the talk leads to better overall education for those who attend,” Dr. Smith said.
NP/PA
This track includes topics chosen by the committee for advanced practice professionals.
“There are many hospitalist programs that include NP/PAs – this is what came through in all the feedback – and everybody is struggling with how do you best incorporate NPs and PAs into the group practice and have everybody work at the top of their license and work well together,” Dr. Finn said.
“The idea, too, is to be very inclusive of all providers and offering a track that focuses on NP/PAs but also includes physicians, physician leaders, and physician administrators,” Dr. Smith said. “It’s not designed for one type of practicing professional; it should be a good educational track for all.”
Palliative care
This was a topic that had been sprinkled throughout programs in previous years, but Dr. Finn and Dr. Smith said it was considered too important not to have its own track this year.
“I think hospitalists are often the doctors caring for patients at the end of their lives since many Americans die in the hospital,” Dr. Finn said. “So as a result, this is a skill set that as hospitalists we need to be very good at.”
Seasoning your career
This is a track geared toward one of this year’s themes: With “hospital medicine” now a concept that’s more than two decades old, how do hospitalists keep up the momentum in their careers, how do they take stock, how do they make the important decisions they face as they move ahead in their jobs?
“Hospital medicine is now over 20 years old – many hospitalists are now mid-career,” Dr. Finn said. “We picked an entire track on ‘seasoning your career’ to offer people ideas and skills to reflect on and rethink their career. Do you want to expand what you’re doing? Do you want to change it? How do you make this a lifelong career?”
Career development
There have always been workshops with a ‘career development’ focus, but this year six of them were chosen to be placed under the heading of an official “career development” workshop track.
“When you review the Day-at-a-Glance schedule, it really demarcates it,” Dr. Smith said. “This really helps attendees be able to quickly look through and find where they want to be for their next session.”
“Are there other skills you want to take on for the second half of your career?” Dr. Finn said. “Do you want to take on leadership? Do you want to learn how to better give your peers feedback? Do you want to promote women in your group? Do you want to prevent burnout or use emotional intelligence to improve your career? We cohorted these topics together.”
Aside from the new tracks, the course directors also drew attention to other new elements of the HM18 program.
For instance there are new topics in the Rapid Fire sessions. In the “Managing the patient on your service: Appendicitis, Bowel and biliary obstruction” session, a general surgeon will talk about how to manage these surgical issues when the patient is on a medical service. In “Interventional radiology: What every hospitalist needs to know,” an interventional radiologist will discuss when hospitalists may want to call in an interventional radiologist or refer to a hospital that has an interventional radiologist. And “Vulnerable populations and hospitalists” will continue with the theme of social determinants of health that was highlighted at last year’s meeting by keynote speaker Karen DeSalvo, MD, the national coordinator for health information technology.
Dr. Smith said that the program committee directors work with the Rapid Fire presenters so that the three or four questions discussed in the sessions are what attendees will want to learn most.
“We take an additional step: Once we recruit the speaker and have identified the topic, we have members of our committee work with the speakers,” he said.
“We don’t want them to come and give us an esoteric talk in an area that interests them. We want them to answer the clinical questions that hospitalists have,” Dr. Finn added.
Dr. Finn and Dr. Smith also highlighted sessions with a twist. For example, “Stupefy: EKGs for fun” is a session about EKGs that encourages hospitalists to “just go have fun reading them,” Dr. Finn said, while “Voldemort is on the plane: Airplane emergencies,” is scheduled for the final day of the conference, just before everyone flies back home.
As for catchy Disney-influenced titles, such as “The Mad Hatter: Updates in delirium” and “Waiting in line for ‘It’s a Small World’ and other things we do for no reason,” part of the credit can go to Dr. Finn’s niece. She said she “hired” her to come up with a list of Disney, Pixar, and Harry Potter movies and catchphrases. Then the committee worked them into the session titles.
Dr. Smith joked that part of his role was to veto some titles that were “a bit too cringe-worthy.”
“The theme of Orlando is making people happy,” Dr. Finn said. “One of the goals – the hopes – for me for at this meeting is that people bring their inner child and get curious again and explore new ideas and new topics and new career possibilities.”
At the 2018 annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine – running from April 8 to 11 in Orlando – the theme could well be “in with the new, and in with the new.”
Planners for Hospital Medicine 2018 (HM18) have managed to pack the conference with five new tracks: Great Debate, Nurse Practitioner/Physician’s Assistant (NP/PA), Palliative Care, Seasoning Your Career, and a new Career Development workshop track. And they did this while eliminating only one track that was on the schedule last year – technology – and without adding any extra days to the meeting.
“We decided, since there were a bunch of themes that we really wanted to cover, we would do half-day tracks. The shorter tracks are also a way to gauge interest in a topic without making a big commitment to it,” Dr. Finn said. “The grouping of topics in smaller tracks in the Day-at-a-Glance helps people easily see a collection of lectures or a theme they might want to attend.”
While choosing themes for the meeting, the planners were trying to stay true to their own theme: timeliness.
“There’s pressure to make it a very relevant meeting,” Dr. Finn said. “We really want to have our finger on the pulse of what practicing hospitalists need and want to know and what is important to them. All the members of the committee feel very invested in figuring out: What is timely? What do we want to talk about right now? What are the active discussions and issues going on in health care that affect us in our practice?”
Assistant course director Dustin Smith, MD, FHM, an associate professor of medicine at Emory University, Atlanta, said much of the information for this year’s meeting came from the 2017 annual meeting, including attendance at sessions, speaker reviews, and session ratings.
“It’s building on momentum from the previous meeting,” he said. “Sometimes we choose things to offer that we know are going to go well, and sometimes we choose things that we hope go well, and all of a sudden we see [that they] go very, very well.” For instance, he said, the topic of sepsis was so popular last year that it has its own precourse this year.
The data on which the HM18 program is built doesn’t stop there. The 23 members of the planning committee – chosen strategically to represent a wide geographic range and array of practice types – all bring their own thoughts and experiences, as well as input from colleagues at their own centers. Then there are the submissions for workshop topics: Any SHM member can submit an idea, and – while just a few are chosen – those ideas help organizers see patterns of interest that can affect the planning of the rest of the sessions.
Here are more details on the new tracks:
Great debate
The annual meeting has traditionally had a “Great Debate” on perioperative medicine, but the format – with carefully chosen speakers who are dynamic and entertaining – will be used to cover pulmonary medicine and infectious diseases this year as well.
“It’s a hugely successful talk,” Dr. Finn said. “We can tell by our numbers that lots of people go, and it’s always funny, and it’s a very clever way of discussing the latest literature – by having two very dynamic speakers present a case and then debate the two options of the case and then use the literature to support the answer,” she said.
The hope is that the format will be more than just entertaining but will be an effective teaching tool, too.
“We think the high level of engagement and format of the talk leads to better overall education for those who attend,” Dr. Smith said.
NP/PA
This track includes topics chosen by the committee for advanced practice professionals.
“There are many hospitalist programs that include NP/PAs – this is what came through in all the feedback – and everybody is struggling with how do you best incorporate NPs and PAs into the group practice and have everybody work at the top of their license and work well together,” Dr. Finn said.
“The idea, too, is to be very inclusive of all providers and offering a track that focuses on NP/PAs but also includes physicians, physician leaders, and physician administrators,” Dr. Smith said. “It’s not designed for one type of practicing professional; it should be a good educational track for all.”
Palliative care
This was a topic that had been sprinkled throughout programs in previous years, but Dr. Finn and Dr. Smith said it was considered too important not to have its own track this year.
“I think hospitalists are often the doctors caring for patients at the end of their lives since many Americans die in the hospital,” Dr. Finn said. “So as a result, this is a skill set that as hospitalists we need to be very good at.”
Seasoning your career
This is a track geared toward one of this year’s themes: With “hospital medicine” now a concept that’s more than two decades old, how do hospitalists keep up the momentum in their careers, how do they take stock, how do they make the important decisions they face as they move ahead in their jobs?
“Hospital medicine is now over 20 years old – many hospitalists are now mid-career,” Dr. Finn said. “We picked an entire track on ‘seasoning your career’ to offer people ideas and skills to reflect on and rethink their career. Do you want to expand what you’re doing? Do you want to change it? How do you make this a lifelong career?”
Career development
There have always been workshops with a ‘career development’ focus, but this year six of them were chosen to be placed under the heading of an official “career development” workshop track.
“When you review the Day-at-a-Glance schedule, it really demarcates it,” Dr. Smith said. “This really helps attendees be able to quickly look through and find where they want to be for their next session.”
“Are there other skills you want to take on for the second half of your career?” Dr. Finn said. “Do you want to take on leadership? Do you want to learn how to better give your peers feedback? Do you want to promote women in your group? Do you want to prevent burnout or use emotional intelligence to improve your career? We cohorted these topics together.”
Aside from the new tracks, the course directors also drew attention to other new elements of the HM18 program.
For instance there are new topics in the Rapid Fire sessions. In the “Managing the patient on your service: Appendicitis, Bowel and biliary obstruction” session, a general surgeon will talk about how to manage these surgical issues when the patient is on a medical service. In “Interventional radiology: What every hospitalist needs to know,” an interventional radiologist will discuss when hospitalists may want to call in an interventional radiologist or refer to a hospital that has an interventional radiologist. And “Vulnerable populations and hospitalists” will continue with the theme of social determinants of health that was highlighted at last year’s meeting by keynote speaker Karen DeSalvo, MD, the national coordinator for health information technology.
Dr. Smith said that the program committee directors work with the Rapid Fire presenters so that the three or four questions discussed in the sessions are what attendees will want to learn most.
“We take an additional step: Once we recruit the speaker and have identified the topic, we have members of our committee work with the speakers,” he said.
“We don’t want them to come and give us an esoteric talk in an area that interests them. We want them to answer the clinical questions that hospitalists have,” Dr. Finn added.
Dr. Finn and Dr. Smith also highlighted sessions with a twist. For example, “Stupefy: EKGs for fun” is a session about EKGs that encourages hospitalists to “just go have fun reading them,” Dr. Finn said, while “Voldemort is on the plane: Airplane emergencies,” is scheduled for the final day of the conference, just before everyone flies back home.
As for catchy Disney-influenced titles, such as “The Mad Hatter: Updates in delirium” and “Waiting in line for ‘It’s a Small World’ and other things we do for no reason,” part of the credit can go to Dr. Finn’s niece. She said she “hired” her to come up with a list of Disney, Pixar, and Harry Potter movies and catchphrases. Then the committee worked them into the session titles.
Dr. Smith joked that part of his role was to veto some titles that were “a bit too cringe-worthy.”
“The theme of Orlando is making people happy,” Dr. Finn said. “One of the goals – the hopes – for me for at this meeting is that people bring their inner child and get curious again and explore new ideas and new topics and new career possibilities.”