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Stoking collaboration between adult and pediatric clinicians
Samir S. Shah, MD, MSCE, director of the division of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, believes that pediatric and adult hospitalists have much to learn from each other. And he aims to promote that mutual education in his new role as editor in chief of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
Dr. Shah is the first pediatric hospitalist to hold this position for JHM, the official journal of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He says his new position, which became effective Jan. 1, is primed for fostering interaction between pediatric and adult hospitalists. “Pediatric hospital medicine is such a vibrant community of its own. There are many opportunities for partnership and collaboration between adult and pediatric hospitalists,” he said.
The field of pediatric hospital medicine has started down the path toward becoming recognized as a board-certified subspecialty.1 “That will place a greater emphasis on our role in fellowship training, which is important to ensure that pediatric hospitalists have a clearly defined skill set,” Dr. Shah said. “So much of what we learn in medical school is oriented to the medical care of adults. If you go into pediatrics, you’ve already had a fair amount of grounding in the healthy physiology and common diseases of adults. Pediatric hospital medicine fellowships offer an opportunity to refine clinical skill sets, as well as develop new skills in domains such as research and leadership.”
An emphasis on diversity
Although he has praised the innovative work of his predecessors, Mark Williams, MD, MHM, and Andrew Auerbach, MD, MPH, MHM, in shepherding the journal to its current strong position, Dr. Shah brings ideas for new features and directions.
“We as a field really benefit from a diversity of skill sets and perspectives. I’m excited to create processes to ensure equity and diversity in everything we do, starting with adding more women and more pediatric hospitalists to the journal’s leadership team, as well as purposefully developing a diverse leadership pipeline for the journal and for the field,” he said.
“We are intentionally reaching out to pediatricians to emphasize the extent to which JHM is invested in their field. For example, we have increased by seven the number of pediatricians as part of the JHM leadership team.” But pediatric hospitalists have always seen JHM as a home for their work, and Dr. Shah himself has published a couple dozen research papers in the journal. “It has always felt to me like a welcoming place,” he said.
“The great thing for me is that I’m not doing this alone. We have a marvelous crew of senior deputy editors, deputy editors, associate editors, and advisors. The opportunity I have is to leverage the phenomenal expertise and enthusiasm of this exceptional team.”
The journal under Dr. Auerbach’s lead created an editorial fellowship program offering opportunities for 1-year mentored exposure to the publication of academic scholarship and to different aspects of how a medical journal works. “We’re excited to continue investing in this program and included an editorial about it and an application form in the January 2019 issue of the Journal,” Dr. Shah said. He encourages editorial fellowship applications from physicians who historically have been underrepresented in academic medicine leadership.
“We’re also creating a column on leadership and professional development so that leaders in different fields can share their perspective and wisdom with our readers. We’ll be presenting a new, shorter review format; distilling clinical practice guidelines; and working on redesigning the journal’s web presence. We believe that our readers interact with the journal differently than they did five years ago, and increasingly are leveraging social media,” he said.
“I’m eager to broaden the scope of the journal. In the past, we focused on quality, value in health care and transitions of care in and out of the hospital, which are important topics. But I’m also excited about the adoption of new technologies, how to evaluate them and incorporate them into medical practice – things like Apple Watch for measuring heart rhythm,” Dr. Shah.
He wants to explore other technology-related topics like alarm fatigue and the use of monitors. Another big subject is the management of health of populations under new, emerging, risk-based payment models, with their pressures on health systems to take greater responsibility for risk. JHM is a medical journal and an official society journal, Dr. Shah said. “But our readership and submitters are not limited to hospitalists. As editor in chief, I’m here to make sure the journal is relevant to our members and to our other constituencies.”
Dr. Shah joined JHM’s editorial leadership team in 2009, then he became its deputy editor in 2012 and its senior deputy editor in 2015. A founding associate editor of the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, he has also served on the editorial board of JAMA Pediatrics. He is editor or coeditor of 12 books in the fields of pediatrics and infectious diseases, including coauthoring “The Philadelphia Guide: Inpatient Pediatrics for McGraw-Hill Education” while still a fellow in academic general pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and, more recently, “Pediatric Infectious Diseases: Essentials for Practice,” a textbook for the pediatric generalist.
Broad scope of activities
Dr. Shah started practicing pediatric hospital medicine in 2001 during his fellowship training. He joined the faculty at CHOP and the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia, in 2005. In 2011 he arrived at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a facility with more than 600 beds that’s affiliated with the University of Cincinnati, where he is professor in the department of pediatrics and holds the James M. Ewell Endowed Chair, to lead a newly created division of hospital medicine. That division now includes more than 55 physician faculty members, 10 nurse practitioners, and nine 3-year fellows.
Collectively the staff represent a broad scope of clinical and research activities along with consulting and surgical comanagement roles and a unique service staffed by med/peds hospitalists for adult patients who have been followed at the hospital since they were children. “Years ago, those patients would not have survived beyond childhood, but with medical advances, they have. Although they continue to benefit from pediatric expertise, these adults also require internal medicine expertise for their adult health needs,” he explained. Examples include patients with neurologic impairments, dependence on medical technology, or congenital heart defects.
Dr. Shah’s own schedule is 28% clinical. He also serves as the hospital’s chief metrics officer, and his research interests include serious infectious diseases, such as pneumonia and meningitis. He is studying the comparative effectiveness of different antibiotic treatments for community-acquired pneumonia and how to improve outcomes for hospital-acquired pneumonia.
Dr. Shah has tried to be deliberate in leading efforts to grow researchers within the field, both nationally and locally. He serves as the chair of the National Childhood Pneumonia Guidelines Committee of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, and he also is vice chair of the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) Network, which facilitates multicenter cost-effectiveness studies among its 120 hospital members. For example, a series of studies funded by the Patient- Centered Outcomes Research Institute has demonstrated the comparable effectiveness of oral and intravenous antibiotics for osteomyelitis and complicated pneumonia.
Sustainable positions
When he was asked whether he felt pediatric hospitalists face particular challenges in trying to take their place in the burgeoning field of hospital medicine, Dr. Shah said he and his colleagues don’t really think of it in those terms. “Hospital medicine is such a dynamic field. For example, pediatric hospital medicine has charted its own course by pursuing subspecialty certification and fellowship training. Yet support from the field broadly has been quite strong, and SHM has embraced pediatricians, who serve on its board of directors and on numerous committees.”
SHM’s commitment to supporting pediatric hospital medicine practice and research includes its cosponsorship, with the Academic Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, an annual pediatric hospital medicine educational and research conference, which will next be held July 25-28, 2019, in Seattle. “In my recent meetings with society leaders I have seen exceptional enthusiasm for increasing the presence of pediatric hospitalists in the society’s work. Many pediatric hospitalists already attend SHM’s annual meeting and submit their research, but we all recognize that a strong pediatric presence is important for the society.”
Dr. Shah credits Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for supporting a sustainable work schedule for its hospitalists and for a team-oriented culture that emphasizes both professional and personal development and encourages a diversity of skill sets and perspectives, skills development, and additional training. “Individuals are recognized for their achievements within and beyond the confines of the hospital. The mentorship structure we set up here is incredible. Each faculty member has a primary mentor, a peer mentor, and access to a career development committee. Additionally, there is broad participation in clinical operations, educational scholarship, research, and quality improvement.”
Dr. Shah’s professional interests in academics, research, and infectious diseases trace back in part to a thesis project he did on neonatal infections while in medical school at Yale University, New Haven, Conn. “I was working with basic sciences in a hematology lab under the direction of the neonatologist Dr. Patrick Gallagher, whose research focused on pediatric blood cell membrane disorders.” Dr. Gallagher, who directs the Yale Center for Blood Disorders, had a keen interest in infections in infants, Dr. Shah recalled.
“He would share with me interesting cases from his practice. What particularly captured my attention was realizing how the research I could do might have a direct impact on patients and families.” Thus inspired to do an additional year of medical school training at Yale before graduating in 1998, Dr. Shah used that year to focus on research, including a placement at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate infectious disease outbreaks, which offered real-world mysteries to solve.
“When I was a resident, pediatric hospital medicine had not yet been recognized as a specialty. But during my fellowships, most of my work was focused on the inpatient side of medicine,” he said. That made hospital medicine a natural career path.
Dr. Shah describes himself as a devoted soccer fan with season tickets for himself, his wife, and their three children to the Major League Soccer team FC Cincinnati. He’s also a movie buff and a former avid bicyclist who’s now trying to get back into cycling. He encourages readers of The Hospitalist to contact him with input on any aspect of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Email him at Samir.shah@cchmc.org and follow him on Twitter: @samirshahmd.
Reference
1. Barrett DJ et al. Pediatric hospital medicine: A proposed new subspecialty. Pediatrics. 2017 March;139(3):e20161823.
Stoking collaboration between adult and pediatric clinicians
Stoking collaboration between adult and pediatric clinicians
Samir S. Shah, MD, MSCE, director of the division of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, believes that pediatric and adult hospitalists have much to learn from each other. And he aims to promote that mutual education in his new role as editor in chief of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
Dr. Shah is the first pediatric hospitalist to hold this position for JHM, the official journal of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He says his new position, which became effective Jan. 1, is primed for fostering interaction between pediatric and adult hospitalists. “Pediatric hospital medicine is such a vibrant community of its own. There are many opportunities for partnership and collaboration between adult and pediatric hospitalists,” he said.
The field of pediatric hospital medicine has started down the path toward becoming recognized as a board-certified subspecialty.1 “That will place a greater emphasis on our role in fellowship training, which is important to ensure that pediatric hospitalists have a clearly defined skill set,” Dr. Shah said. “So much of what we learn in medical school is oriented to the medical care of adults. If you go into pediatrics, you’ve already had a fair amount of grounding in the healthy physiology and common diseases of adults. Pediatric hospital medicine fellowships offer an opportunity to refine clinical skill sets, as well as develop new skills in domains such as research and leadership.”
An emphasis on diversity
Although he has praised the innovative work of his predecessors, Mark Williams, MD, MHM, and Andrew Auerbach, MD, MPH, MHM, in shepherding the journal to its current strong position, Dr. Shah brings ideas for new features and directions.
“We as a field really benefit from a diversity of skill sets and perspectives. I’m excited to create processes to ensure equity and diversity in everything we do, starting with adding more women and more pediatric hospitalists to the journal’s leadership team, as well as purposefully developing a diverse leadership pipeline for the journal and for the field,” he said.
“We are intentionally reaching out to pediatricians to emphasize the extent to which JHM is invested in their field. For example, we have increased by seven the number of pediatricians as part of the JHM leadership team.” But pediatric hospitalists have always seen JHM as a home for their work, and Dr. Shah himself has published a couple dozen research papers in the journal. “It has always felt to me like a welcoming place,” he said.
“The great thing for me is that I’m not doing this alone. We have a marvelous crew of senior deputy editors, deputy editors, associate editors, and advisors. The opportunity I have is to leverage the phenomenal expertise and enthusiasm of this exceptional team.”
The journal under Dr. Auerbach’s lead created an editorial fellowship program offering opportunities for 1-year mentored exposure to the publication of academic scholarship and to different aspects of how a medical journal works. “We’re excited to continue investing in this program and included an editorial about it and an application form in the January 2019 issue of the Journal,” Dr. Shah said. He encourages editorial fellowship applications from physicians who historically have been underrepresented in academic medicine leadership.
“We’re also creating a column on leadership and professional development so that leaders in different fields can share their perspective and wisdom with our readers. We’ll be presenting a new, shorter review format; distilling clinical practice guidelines; and working on redesigning the journal’s web presence. We believe that our readers interact with the journal differently than they did five years ago, and increasingly are leveraging social media,” he said.
“I’m eager to broaden the scope of the journal. In the past, we focused on quality, value in health care and transitions of care in and out of the hospital, which are important topics. But I’m also excited about the adoption of new technologies, how to evaluate them and incorporate them into medical practice – things like Apple Watch for measuring heart rhythm,” Dr. Shah.
He wants to explore other technology-related topics like alarm fatigue and the use of monitors. Another big subject is the management of health of populations under new, emerging, risk-based payment models, with their pressures on health systems to take greater responsibility for risk. JHM is a medical journal and an official society journal, Dr. Shah said. “But our readership and submitters are not limited to hospitalists. As editor in chief, I’m here to make sure the journal is relevant to our members and to our other constituencies.”
Dr. Shah joined JHM’s editorial leadership team in 2009, then he became its deputy editor in 2012 and its senior deputy editor in 2015. A founding associate editor of the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, he has also served on the editorial board of JAMA Pediatrics. He is editor or coeditor of 12 books in the fields of pediatrics and infectious diseases, including coauthoring “The Philadelphia Guide: Inpatient Pediatrics for McGraw-Hill Education” while still a fellow in academic general pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and, more recently, “Pediatric Infectious Diseases: Essentials for Practice,” a textbook for the pediatric generalist.
Broad scope of activities
Dr. Shah started practicing pediatric hospital medicine in 2001 during his fellowship training. He joined the faculty at CHOP and the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia, in 2005. In 2011 he arrived at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a facility with more than 600 beds that’s affiliated with the University of Cincinnati, where he is professor in the department of pediatrics and holds the James M. Ewell Endowed Chair, to lead a newly created division of hospital medicine. That division now includes more than 55 physician faculty members, 10 nurse practitioners, and nine 3-year fellows.
Collectively the staff represent a broad scope of clinical and research activities along with consulting and surgical comanagement roles and a unique service staffed by med/peds hospitalists for adult patients who have been followed at the hospital since they were children. “Years ago, those patients would not have survived beyond childhood, but with medical advances, they have. Although they continue to benefit from pediatric expertise, these adults also require internal medicine expertise for their adult health needs,” he explained. Examples include patients with neurologic impairments, dependence on medical technology, or congenital heart defects.
Dr. Shah’s own schedule is 28% clinical. He also serves as the hospital’s chief metrics officer, and his research interests include serious infectious diseases, such as pneumonia and meningitis. He is studying the comparative effectiveness of different antibiotic treatments for community-acquired pneumonia and how to improve outcomes for hospital-acquired pneumonia.
Dr. Shah has tried to be deliberate in leading efforts to grow researchers within the field, both nationally and locally. He serves as the chair of the National Childhood Pneumonia Guidelines Committee of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, and he also is vice chair of the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) Network, which facilitates multicenter cost-effectiveness studies among its 120 hospital members. For example, a series of studies funded by the Patient- Centered Outcomes Research Institute has demonstrated the comparable effectiveness of oral and intravenous antibiotics for osteomyelitis and complicated pneumonia.
Sustainable positions
When he was asked whether he felt pediatric hospitalists face particular challenges in trying to take their place in the burgeoning field of hospital medicine, Dr. Shah said he and his colleagues don’t really think of it in those terms. “Hospital medicine is such a dynamic field. For example, pediatric hospital medicine has charted its own course by pursuing subspecialty certification and fellowship training. Yet support from the field broadly has been quite strong, and SHM has embraced pediatricians, who serve on its board of directors and on numerous committees.”
SHM’s commitment to supporting pediatric hospital medicine practice and research includes its cosponsorship, with the Academic Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, an annual pediatric hospital medicine educational and research conference, which will next be held July 25-28, 2019, in Seattle. “In my recent meetings with society leaders I have seen exceptional enthusiasm for increasing the presence of pediatric hospitalists in the society’s work. Many pediatric hospitalists already attend SHM’s annual meeting and submit their research, but we all recognize that a strong pediatric presence is important for the society.”
Dr. Shah credits Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for supporting a sustainable work schedule for its hospitalists and for a team-oriented culture that emphasizes both professional and personal development and encourages a diversity of skill sets and perspectives, skills development, and additional training. “Individuals are recognized for their achievements within and beyond the confines of the hospital. The mentorship structure we set up here is incredible. Each faculty member has a primary mentor, a peer mentor, and access to a career development committee. Additionally, there is broad participation in clinical operations, educational scholarship, research, and quality improvement.”
Dr. Shah’s professional interests in academics, research, and infectious diseases trace back in part to a thesis project he did on neonatal infections while in medical school at Yale University, New Haven, Conn. “I was working with basic sciences in a hematology lab under the direction of the neonatologist Dr. Patrick Gallagher, whose research focused on pediatric blood cell membrane disorders.” Dr. Gallagher, who directs the Yale Center for Blood Disorders, had a keen interest in infections in infants, Dr. Shah recalled.
“He would share with me interesting cases from his practice. What particularly captured my attention was realizing how the research I could do might have a direct impact on patients and families.” Thus inspired to do an additional year of medical school training at Yale before graduating in 1998, Dr. Shah used that year to focus on research, including a placement at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate infectious disease outbreaks, which offered real-world mysteries to solve.
“When I was a resident, pediatric hospital medicine had not yet been recognized as a specialty. But during my fellowships, most of my work was focused on the inpatient side of medicine,” he said. That made hospital medicine a natural career path.
Dr. Shah describes himself as a devoted soccer fan with season tickets for himself, his wife, and their three children to the Major League Soccer team FC Cincinnati. He’s also a movie buff and a former avid bicyclist who’s now trying to get back into cycling. He encourages readers of The Hospitalist to contact him with input on any aspect of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Email him at Samir.shah@cchmc.org and follow him on Twitter: @samirshahmd.
Reference
1. Barrett DJ et al. Pediatric hospital medicine: A proposed new subspecialty. Pediatrics. 2017 March;139(3):e20161823.
Samir S. Shah, MD, MSCE, director of the division of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, believes that pediatric and adult hospitalists have much to learn from each other. And he aims to promote that mutual education in his new role as editor in chief of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
Dr. Shah is the first pediatric hospitalist to hold this position for JHM, the official journal of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He says his new position, which became effective Jan. 1, is primed for fostering interaction between pediatric and adult hospitalists. “Pediatric hospital medicine is such a vibrant community of its own. There are many opportunities for partnership and collaboration between adult and pediatric hospitalists,” he said.
The field of pediatric hospital medicine has started down the path toward becoming recognized as a board-certified subspecialty.1 “That will place a greater emphasis on our role in fellowship training, which is important to ensure that pediatric hospitalists have a clearly defined skill set,” Dr. Shah said. “So much of what we learn in medical school is oriented to the medical care of adults. If you go into pediatrics, you’ve already had a fair amount of grounding in the healthy physiology and common diseases of adults. Pediatric hospital medicine fellowships offer an opportunity to refine clinical skill sets, as well as develop new skills in domains such as research and leadership.”
An emphasis on diversity
Although he has praised the innovative work of his predecessors, Mark Williams, MD, MHM, and Andrew Auerbach, MD, MPH, MHM, in shepherding the journal to its current strong position, Dr. Shah brings ideas for new features and directions.
“We as a field really benefit from a diversity of skill sets and perspectives. I’m excited to create processes to ensure equity and diversity in everything we do, starting with adding more women and more pediatric hospitalists to the journal’s leadership team, as well as purposefully developing a diverse leadership pipeline for the journal and for the field,” he said.
“We are intentionally reaching out to pediatricians to emphasize the extent to which JHM is invested in their field. For example, we have increased by seven the number of pediatricians as part of the JHM leadership team.” But pediatric hospitalists have always seen JHM as a home for their work, and Dr. Shah himself has published a couple dozen research papers in the journal. “It has always felt to me like a welcoming place,” he said.
“The great thing for me is that I’m not doing this alone. We have a marvelous crew of senior deputy editors, deputy editors, associate editors, and advisors. The opportunity I have is to leverage the phenomenal expertise and enthusiasm of this exceptional team.”
The journal under Dr. Auerbach’s lead created an editorial fellowship program offering opportunities for 1-year mentored exposure to the publication of academic scholarship and to different aspects of how a medical journal works. “We’re excited to continue investing in this program and included an editorial about it and an application form in the January 2019 issue of the Journal,” Dr. Shah said. He encourages editorial fellowship applications from physicians who historically have been underrepresented in academic medicine leadership.
“We’re also creating a column on leadership and professional development so that leaders in different fields can share their perspective and wisdom with our readers. We’ll be presenting a new, shorter review format; distilling clinical practice guidelines; and working on redesigning the journal’s web presence. We believe that our readers interact with the journal differently than they did five years ago, and increasingly are leveraging social media,” he said.
“I’m eager to broaden the scope of the journal. In the past, we focused on quality, value in health care and transitions of care in and out of the hospital, which are important topics. But I’m also excited about the adoption of new technologies, how to evaluate them and incorporate them into medical practice – things like Apple Watch for measuring heart rhythm,” Dr. Shah.
He wants to explore other technology-related topics like alarm fatigue and the use of monitors. Another big subject is the management of health of populations under new, emerging, risk-based payment models, with their pressures on health systems to take greater responsibility for risk. JHM is a medical journal and an official society journal, Dr. Shah said. “But our readership and submitters are not limited to hospitalists. As editor in chief, I’m here to make sure the journal is relevant to our members and to our other constituencies.”
Dr. Shah joined JHM’s editorial leadership team in 2009, then he became its deputy editor in 2012 and its senior deputy editor in 2015. A founding associate editor of the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, he has also served on the editorial board of JAMA Pediatrics. He is editor or coeditor of 12 books in the fields of pediatrics and infectious diseases, including coauthoring “The Philadelphia Guide: Inpatient Pediatrics for McGraw-Hill Education” while still a fellow in academic general pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and, more recently, “Pediatric Infectious Diseases: Essentials for Practice,” a textbook for the pediatric generalist.
Broad scope of activities
Dr. Shah started practicing pediatric hospital medicine in 2001 during his fellowship training. He joined the faculty at CHOP and the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia, in 2005. In 2011 he arrived at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a facility with more than 600 beds that’s affiliated with the University of Cincinnati, where he is professor in the department of pediatrics and holds the James M. Ewell Endowed Chair, to lead a newly created division of hospital medicine. That division now includes more than 55 physician faculty members, 10 nurse practitioners, and nine 3-year fellows.
Collectively the staff represent a broad scope of clinical and research activities along with consulting and surgical comanagement roles and a unique service staffed by med/peds hospitalists for adult patients who have been followed at the hospital since they were children. “Years ago, those patients would not have survived beyond childhood, but with medical advances, they have. Although they continue to benefit from pediatric expertise, these adults also require internal medicine expertise for their adult health needs,” he explained. Examples include patients with neurologic impairments, dependence on medical technology, or congenital heart defects.
Dr. Shah’s own schedule is 28% clinical. He also serves as the hospital’s chief metrics officer, and his research interests include serious infectious diseases, such as pneumonia and meningitis. He is studying the comparative effectiveness of different antibiotic treatments for community-acquired pneumonia and how to improve outcomes for hospital-acquired pneumonia.
Dr. Shah has tried to be deliberate in leading efforts to grow researchers within the field, both nationally and locally. He serves as the chair of the National Childhood Pneumonia Guidelines Committee of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, and he also is vice chair of the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) Network, which facilitates multicenter cost-effectiveness studies among its 120 hospital members. For example, a series of studies funded by the Patient- Centered Outcomes Research Institute has demonstrated the comparable effectiveness of oral and intravenous antibiotics for osteomyelitis and complicated pneumonia.
Sustainable positions
When he was asked whether he felt pediatric hospitalists face particular challenges in trying to take their place in the burgeoning field of hospital medicine, Dr. Shah said he and his colleagues don’t really think of it in those terms. “Hospital medicine is such a dynamic field. For example, pediatric hospital medicine has charted its own course by pursuing subspecialty certification and fellowship training. Yet support from the field broadly has been quite strong, and SHM has embraced pediatricians, who serve on its board of directors and on numerous committees.”
SHM’s commitment to supporting pediatric hospital medicine practice and research includes its cosponsorship, with the Academic Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, an annual pediatric hospital medicine educational and research conference, which will next be held July 25-28, 2019, in Seattle. “In my recent meetings with society leaders I have seen exceptional enthusiasm for increasing the presence of pediatric hospitalists in the society’s work. Many pediatric hospitalists already attend SHM’s annual meeting and submit their research, but we all recognize that a strong pediatric presence is important for the society.”
Dr. Shah credits Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for supporting a sustainable work schedule for its hospitalists and for a team-oriented culture that emphasizes both professional and personal development and encourages a diversity of skill sets and perspectives, skills development, and additional training. “Individuals are recognized for their achievements within and beyond the confines of the hospital. The mentorship structure we set up here is incredible. Each faculty member has a primary mentor, a peer mentor, and access to a career development committee. Additionally, there is broad participation in clinical operations, educational scholarship, research, and quality improvement.”
Dr. Shah’s professional interests in academics, research, and infectious diseases trace back in part to a thesis project he did on neonatal infections while in medical school at Yale University, New Haven, Conn. “I was working with basic sciences in a hematology lab under the direction of the neonatologist Dr. Patrick Gallagher, whose research focused on pediatric blood cell membrane disorders.” Dr. Gallagher, who directs the Yale Center for Blood Disorders, had a keen interest in infections in infants, Dr. Shah recalled.
“He would share with me interesting cases from his practice. What particularly captured my attention was realizing how the research I could do might have a direct impact on patients and families.” Thus inspired to do an additional year of medical school training at Yale before graduating in 1998, Dr. Shah used that year to focus on research, including a placement at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate infectious disease outbreaks, which offered real-world mysteries to solve.
“When I was a resident, pediatric hospital medicine had not yet been recognized as a specialty. But during my fellowships, most of my work was focused on the inpatient side of medicine,” he said. That made hospital medicine a natural career path.
Dr. Shah describes himself as a devoted soccer fan with season tickets for himself, his wife, and their three children to the Major League Soccer team FC Cincinnati. He’s also a movie buff and a former avid bicyclist who’s now trying to get back into cycling. He encourages readers of The Hospitalist to contact him with input on any aspect of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Email him at Samir.shah@cchmc.org and follow him on Twitter: @samirshahmd.
Reference
1. Barrett DJ et al. Pediatric hospital medicine: A proposed new subspecialty. Pediatrics. 2017 March;139(3):e20161823.