Hospital Medicine 19

Leaders of SHM chapters give their take-away points from the Chapter Leader Training Program and highlights from their own local programs.

Vidyard Video

Leaders of SHM chapters give their take-away points from the Chapter Leader Training Program and highlights from their own local programs.

Vidyard Video

Leaders of SHM chapters give their take-away points from the Chapter Leader Training Program and highlights from their own local programs.

Vidyard Video

Society of Hospital Medicine President Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, told a packed ballroom of hospitalists at HM19 on Monday that it’s not change to the health care industry that is most central to their future, but it’s how they assume a role within it and how they spark it themselves.

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

With a tone that was, at times, almost ebullient about change, Dr. Afsar characterized the flux of health care as a series of opportunities to improve patient care.

“Run toward change,” said Dr. Afsar, chief ambulatory officer and chief medical officer for accountable care organizations at University of California, Irvine. “And be a force of positive change.”

The push toward affordability and value has made for some “unlikely partners,” she noted, including the health care venture launched by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, as well as some newer corporations stepping into the health care sphere, such as Uber with its UberHealth and the creation of giants like the CVS-Aetna merger.

She acknowledged it brings “uncertainty and risk” but suggested that hospitalists are equipped to cope, saying that “we’ve all experienced this in our personal and professional lives.”

Dr. Afsar described four major themes of change to the health care landscape that will affect how hospitalists do their jobs.

• A new setting of care. “The care of the patients is moving from the hospital to the ambulatory setting,” she said. “Some of the surgeries that we used to do in the ER are now being done in ambulatory surgery centers. Antibiotics are being infused via IVs at patients’ homes.”
• Focus on health and well-being. “There’s a transition as a society on focusing on the sick to prevention of disease,” she said. “How can we prevent chronic illness once it occurs? How can we limit its progression? This is a very new focus for us in health care.”
• An increasing role of patient care teams – including primary care doctors, pharmacists, and case managers – rather than hospital-based teams.
• A new focus on patient-centered care. “It’s a focus about how we can be everywhere the patient is, at anytime that the patient needs us,” she said.

A sense of the way forward, Dr. Afsar said, came out of recent strategic meetings of the SHM board of directors, in which they talked about the role and future of hospitalists in population health management and value-based care. They agreed hospitalists should define themselves by their values and competencies, not by the hospital building itself. Hospitalists should use the acute care episode to make sure patients are connected to a larger system of care with wellness and prevention in mind.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent,” Dr. Afsar said. “But the ones who are most adaptable to change. While there’s debate on the Internet about who originally said this, there’s absolutely no debate that the theme in life and in health care is adaptability in the face of constant change.”

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

In his own address at the Annual Conference of the Society of Hospital Medicine, Christopher Frost, MD, SFHM, the president-elect of SHM and national medical director of hospital-based services for LifePoint Health in Brentwood, Tenn., echoed Dr. Afsar’s theme of action in the context of change.

A key word, he said, is “multifarious” – the health care industry changes and the ways hospitalists are tackling these changes come in many and various types.

“We will not just react to – but actually help author – aspects of this change,” he said, including the continued move from fee for service to value-based and risk-based models of payment, and how to put new insights into disease processes to use and how they’re linked to social factors.

Increasing the diversity of hospitalist teams, maximizing the use of technology, and improving LGBTQ care are all themes of change being addressed at the meeting, he noted.

“When we summit one mountain of our own professional Alps,” Dr. Frost said, “and we see another on the horizon, we say, ‘Let’s climb that one. Let’s go there.’ ”

Society of Hospital Medicine President Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, told a packed ballroom of hospitalists at HM19 on Monday that it’s not change to the health care industry that is most central to their future, but it’s how they assume a role within it and how they spark it themselves.

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

With a tone that was, at times, almost ebullient about change, Dr. Afsar characterized the flux of health care as a series of opportunities to improve patient care.

“Run toward change,” said Dr. Afsar, chief ambulatory officer and chief medical officer for accountable care organizations at University of California, Irvine. “And be a force of positive change.”

The push toward affordability and value has made for some “unlikely partners,” she noted, including the health care venture launched by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, as well as some newer corporations stepping into the health care sphere, such as Uber with its UberHealth and the creation of giants like the CVS-Aetna merger.

She acknowledged it brings “uncertainty and risk” but suggested that hospitalists are equipped to cope, saying that “we’ve all experienced this in our personal and professional lives.”

Dr. Afsar described four major themes of change to the health care landscape that will affect how hospitalists do their jobs.

• A new setting of care. “The care of the patients is moving from the hospital to the ambulatory setting,” she said. “Some of the surgeries that we used to do in the ER are now being done in ambulatory surgery centers. Antibiotics are being infused via IVs at patients’ homes.”
• Focus on health and well-being. “There’s a transition as a society on focusing on the sick to prevention of disease,” she said. “How can we prevent chronic illness once it occurs? How can we limit its progression? This is a very new focus for us in health care.”
• An increasing role of patient care teams – including primary care doctors, pharmacists, and case managers – rather than hospital-based teams.
• A new focus on patient-centered care. “It’s a focus about how we can be everywhere the patient is, at anytime that the patient needs us,” she said.

A sense of the way forward, Dr. Afsar said, came out of recent strategic meetings of the SHM board of directors, in which they talked about the role and future of hospitalists in population health management and value-based care. They agreed hospitalists should define themselves by their values and competencies, not by the hospital building itself. Hospitalists should use the acute care episode to make sure patients are connected to a larger system of care with wellness and prevention in mind.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent,” Dr. Afsar said. “But the ones who are most adaptable to change. While there’s debate on the Internet about who originally said this, there’s absolutely no debate that the theme in life and in health care is adaptability in the face of constant change.”

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

In his own address at the Annual Conference of the Society of Hospital Medicine, Christopher Frost, MD, SFHM, the president-elect of SHM and national medical director of hospital-based services for LifePoint Health in Brentwood, Tenn., echoed Dr. Afsar’s theme of action in the context of change.

A key word, he said, is “multifarious” – the health care industry changes and the ways hospitalists are tackling these changes come in many and various types.

“We will not just react to – but actually help author – aspects of this change,” he said, including the continued move from fee for service to value-based and risk-based models of payment, and how to put new insights into disease processes to use and how they’re linked to social factors.

Increasing the diversity of hospitalist teams, maximizing the use of technology, and improving LGBTQ care are all themes of change being addressed at the meeting, he noted.

“When we summit one mountain of our own professional Alps,” Dr. Frost said, “and we see another on the horizon, we say, ‘Let’s climb that one. Let’s go there.’ ”

Society of Hospital Medicine President Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, told a packed ballroom of hospitalists at HM19 on Monday that it’s not change to the health care industry that is most central to their future, but it’s how they assume a role within it and how they spark it themselves.

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

With a tone that was, at times, almost ebullient about change, Dr. Afsar characterized the flux of health care as a series of opportunities to improve patient care.

“Run toward change,” said Dr. Afsar, chief ambulatory officer and chief medical officer for accountable care organizations at University of California, Irvine. “And be a force of positive change.”

The push toward affordability and value has made for some “unlikely partners,” she noted, including the health care venture launched by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, as well as some newer corporations stepping into the health care sphere, such as Uber with its UberHealth and the creation of giants like the CVS-Aetna merger.

She acknowledged it brings “uncertainty and risk” but suggested that hospitalists are equipped to cope, saying that “we’ve all experienced this in our personal and professional lives.”

Dr. Afsar described four major themes of change to the health care landscape that will affect how hospitalists do their jobs.

• A new setting of care. “The care of the patients is moving from the hospital to the ambulatory setting,” she said. “Some of the surgeries that we used to do in the ER are now being done in ambulatory surgery centers. Antibiotics are being infused via IVs at patients’ homes.”
• Focus on health and well-being. “There’s a transition as a society on focusing on the sick to prevention of disease,” she said. “How can we prevent chronic illness once it occurs? How can we limit its progression? This is a very new focus for us in health care.”
• An increasing role of patient care teams – including primary care doctors, pharmacists, and case managers – rather than hospital-based teams.
• A new focus on patient-centered care. “It’s a focus about how we can be everywhere the patient is, at anytime that the patient needs us,” she said.

A sense of the way forward, Dr. Afsar said, came out of recent strategic meetings of the SHM board of directors, in which they talked about the role and future of hospitalists in population health management and value-based care. They agreed hospitalists should define themselves by their values and competencies, not by the hospital building itself. Hospitalists should use the acute care episode to make sure patients are connected to a larger system of care with wellness and prevention in mind.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent,” Dr. Afsar said. “But the ones who are most adaptable to change. While there’s debate on the Internet about who originally said this, there’s absolutely no debate that the theme in life and in health care is adaptability in the face of constant change.”

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

In his own address at the Annual Conference of the Society of Hospital Medicine, Christopher Frost, MD, SFHM, the president-elect of SHM and national medical director of hospital-based services for LifePoint Health in Brentwood, Tenn., echoed Dr. Afsar’s theme of action in the context of change.

A key word, he said, is “multifarious” – the health care industry changes and the ways hospitalists are tackling these changes come in many and various types.

“We will not just react to – but actually help author – aspects of this change,” he said, including the continued move from fee for service to value-based and risk-based models of payment, and how to put new insights into disease processes to use and how they’re linked to social factors.

Increasing the diversity of hospitalist teams, maximizing the use of technology, and improving LGBTQ care are all themes of change being addressed at the meeting, he noted.

“When we summit one mountain of our own professional Alps,” Dr. Frost said, “and we see another on the horizon, we say, ‘Let’s climb that one. Let’s go there.’ ”

When fire is eating entire neighborhoods, or a hurricane is smashing towns like toys, the hospitalist will invariably run right toward the disaster.

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

It sounds completely crazy, unless you’re a hospitalist, Mark Shapiro, MD, said during a Monday session. Or a hospitalist’s spouse.

As the Tubbs Fire raged across Northern California in October 2017, Dr. Shapiro fled with his 5-month-old son, his dog, and his wife. And then they had that conversation.

“After we got everyone settled, I said to my wife, ‘Honey, I need to go back.’ And she said, ‘Yes, of course you do.’ Having that clarity and support behind me was so important. I was able to return to the hospital and focus on my job.”

“Trust me,” said Dr. Shapiro, director of hospital medicine at Providence-St. Joseph Health Medical Group in Santa Rosa, Calif. “You will want to do your work.”

The Tubbs Fire opened a week of “extraordinary challenges” said Dr. Shapiro. His lecture, “A Survival Guide for Hospitalists: Emergency Preparedness for Hurricanes, Fires, Mass Casualties, and Other Emergencies,” drew on his personal experiences from that fire, his leadership during the emergency response, and the debriefings that inspired his colleagues and him to plan how to handle future emergencies.

“Over 1 week we struggled and suffered and learned a great deal about hospital operations and how to keep safe in an emergency situation,” he said in an interview.

The prime directive during any emergency situation is communication, on both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic scale.

“It pays to have these conversations with family and friends before a disaster happens, so that they understand you will have to go to work and that – importantly – you will want to go to work. Lay the groundwork so that when you say, ‘I love you,’ and leave, it’s not a surprise. It’s extremely important. You need to be able to do your work knowing that not only are they safe, but they’re also behind you on this.”

On a system-wide scale, emergency communications at work must be “redundant, flexible, and sustainable,” he added.

“You have to be able to communicate as a team, and that means knowing if your team is OK. Are they able to work? Are they hurt? Are they dead? We had to ask those questions at 3 a.m.”

Flexibility gives teams the option to switch communications modes on the fly – extremely important when standard modes may be endangered by natural disasters of all types.

“You don’t know how long one method will last, so your communication tools have to change. In our case, we lost cell communication but texting was intact. And we were lucky – we might not even have had that. What would you do if you lost that? Go to landlines? Pagers? It’s all very contextual.”

Another emergency preparedness must-do that Dr. Shapiro addressed in his presentation? It’s “Drill, drill, drill.”

“You have to understand what this is going to look like,” he said. Who’s going to go where, and when? What is the chain of command, and what happens when something disrupts those things, as will inevitably happen?

Cross-training is a big part of the picture, too. Not only do team members need to do their own job, they should be able to step in and at least competently do someone else’s job, as well.

“People need to be flexible, because ‘job X’ still needs to get done, no matter what.”

Dr. Shapiro’s interest in hospitalists responding to disaster extends even to his podcast, “Explore the Space,” which examines the interface between health care and society, with thought leaders from across the spectrum. Several podcasts in his series touch on disaster response and preparedness, including two from the fall of 2017, focusing specifically on the wildfire. [They can be downloaded for free at Stitcher or Apple Podcasts.]

Dr. Shapiro had no financial disclosures.

When fire is eating entire neighborhoods, or a hurricane is smashing towns like toys, the hospitalist will invariably run right toward the disaster.

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

It sounds completely crazy, unless you’re a hospitalist, Mark Shapiro, MD, said during a Monday session. Or a hospitalist’s spouse.

As the Tubbs Fire raged across Northern California in October 2017, Dr. Shapiro fled with his 5-month-old son, his dog, and his wife. And then they had that conversation.

“After we got everyone settled, I said to my wife, ‘Honey, I need to go back.’ And she said, ‘Yes, of course you do.’ Having that clarity and support behind me was so important. I was able to return to the hospital and focus on my job.”

“Trust me,” said Dr. Shapiro, director of hospital medicine at Providence-St. Joseph Health Medical Group in Santa Rosa, Calif. “You will want to do your work.”

The Tubbs Fire opened a week of “extraordinary challenges” said Dr. Shapiro. His lecture, “A Survival Guide for Hospitalists: Emergency Preparedness for Hurricanes, Fires, Mass Casualties, and Other Emergencies,” drew on his personal experiences from that fire, his leadership during the emergency response, and the debriefings that inspired his colleagues and him to plan how to handle future emergencies.

“Over 1 week we struggled and suffered and learned a great deal about hospital operations and how to keep safe in an emergency situation,” he said in an interview.

The prime directive during any emergency situation is communication, on both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic scale.

“It pays to have these conversations with family and friends before a disaster happens, so that they understand you will have to go to work and that – importantly – you will want to go to work. Lay the groundwork so that when you say, ‘I love you,’ and leave, it’s not a surprise. It’s extremely important. You need to be able to do your work knowing that not only are they safe, but they’re also behind you on this.”

On a system-wide scale, emergency communications at work must be “redundant, flexible, and sustainable,” he added.

“You have to be able to communicate as a team, and that means knowing if your team is OK. Are they able to work? Are they hurt? Are they dead? We had to ask those questions at 3 a.m.”

Flexibility gives teams the option to switch communications modes on the fly – extremely important when standard modes may be endangered by natural disasters of all types.

“You don’t know how long one method will last, so your communication tools have to change. In our case, we lost cell communication but texting was intact. And we were lucky – we might not even have had that. What would you do if you lost that? Go to landlines? Pagers? It’s all very contextual.”

Another emergency preparedness must-do that Dr. Shapiro addressed in his presentation? It’s “Drill, drill, drill.”

“You have to understand what this is going to look like,” he said. Who’s going to go where, and when? What is the chain of command, and what happens when something disrupts those things, as will inevitably happen?

Cross-training is a big part of the picture, too. Not only do team members need to do their own job, they should be able to step in and at least competently do someone else’s job, as well.

“People need to be flexible, because ‘job X’ still needs to get done, no matter what.”

Dr. Shapiro’s interest in hospitalists responding to disaster extends even to his podcast, “Explore the Space,” which examines the interface between health care and society, with thought leaders from across the spectrum. Several podcasts in his series touch on disaster response and preparedness, including two from the fall of 2017, focusing specifically on the wildfire. [They can be downloaded for free at Stitcher or Apple Podcasts.]

Dr. Shapiro had no financial disclosures.

When fire is eating entire neighborhoods, or a hurricane is smashing towns like toys, the hospitalist will invariably run right toward the disaster.

Lou Ferraro, Park South Photography

It sounds completely crazy, unless you’re a hospitalist, Mark Shapiro, MD, said during a Monday session. Or a hospitalist’s spouse.

As the Tubbs Fire raged across Northern California in October 2017, Dr. Shapiro fled with his 5-month-old son, his dog, and his wife. And then they had that conversation.

“After we got everyone settled, I said to my wife, ‘Honey, I need to go back.’ And she said, ‘Yes, of course you do.’ Having that clarity and support behind me was so important. I was able to return to the hospital and focus on my job.”

“Trust me,” said Dr. Shapiro, director of hospital medicine at Providence-St. Joseph Health Medical Group in Santa Rosa, Calif. “You will want to do your work.”

The Tubbs Fire opened a week of “extraordinary challenges” said Dr. Shapiro. His lecture, “A Survival Guide for Hospitalists: Emergency Preparedness for Hurricanes, Fires, Mass Casualties, and Other Emergencies,” drew on his personal experiences from that fire, his leadership during the emergency response, and the debriefings that inspired his colleagues and him to plan how to handle future emergencies.

“Over 1 week we struggled and suffered and learned a great deal about hospital operations and how to keep safe in an emergency situation,” he said in an interview.

The prime directive during any emergency situation is communication, on both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic scale.

“It pays to have these conversations with family and friends before a disaster happens, so that they understand you will have to go to work and that – importantly – you will want to go to work. Lay the groundwork so that when you say, ‘I love you,’ and leave, it’s not a surprise. It’s extremely important. You need to be able to do your work knowing that not only are they safe, but they’re also behind you on this.”

On a system-wide scale, emergency communications at work must be “redundant, flexible, and sustainable,” he added.

“You have to be able to communicate as a team, and that means knowing if your team is OK. Are they able to work? Are they hurt? Are they dead? We had to ask those questions at 3 a.m.”

Flexibility gives teams the option to switch communications modes on the fly – extremely important when standard modes may be endangered by natural disasters of all types.

“You don’t know how long one method will last, so your communication tools have to change. In our case, we lost cell communication but texting was intact. And we were lucky – we might not even have had that. What would you do if you lost that? Go to landlines? Pagers? It’s all very contextual.”

Another emergency preparedness must-do that Dr. Shapiro addressed in his presentation? It’s “Drill, drill, drill.”

“You have to understand what this is going to look like,” he said. Who’s going to go where, and when? What is the chain of command, and what happens when something disrupts those things, as will inevitably happen?

Cross-training is a big part of the picture, too. Not only do team members need to do their own job, they should be able to step in and at least competently do someone else’s job, as well.

“People need to be flexible, because ‘job X’ still needs to get done, no matter what.”

Dr. Shapiro’s interest in hospitalists responding to disaster extends even to his podcast, “Explore the Space,” which examines the interface between health care and society, with thought leaders from across the spectrum. Several podcasts in his series touch on disaster response and preparedness, including two from the fall of 2017, focusing specifically on the wildfire. [They can be downloaded for free at Stitcher or Apple Podcasts.]

Dr. Shapiro had no financial disclosures.

Award of Excellence in Outstanding Service in Hospital Medicine

Kendall Rogers, MD, CPE, SFHM, is chief of the division of hospital medicine at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Albuquerque, where he also serves as a professor. His numerous innovations have tremendously improved patient care and enhanced provider work flow. One of his most notable contributions was the hospital-wide intensive organized glycemic control program, which consists of a dedicated glycemic control advanced practice provider (APP) working closely with surgical and medical teams to ensure proper education and discharge planning for patients. He also helped to create an APP fellowship in hospital medicine at the UNM Health Sciences Center.

His innovations have been recognized on the national level, including with the 2011 John M. Eisenberg Award from the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission in honor of his work as lead mentor in the SHM’s Glycemic Control Mentored Implementation program. Dr. Rogers also has served as chair of the SHM’s Information Technology Committee and has been a member of the society’s Public Policy Committee. He is also a senior fellow in hospital medicine.
 

Award of Excellence in Research

Tara Lagu, MD, MPH, is the associate director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School at Baystate Medical Center, Springfield.

Dr. Lagu has published 103 original peer-reviewed manuscripts in high-impact journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Hospital Medicine, and JAMA. Her research primarily focuses on improving the quality and value of care for patients with acute illness. She has published papers examining hospital care quality for patients with sepsis, heart failure, acute coronary syndrome, pneumonia, and delirium, and has an R01 aimed at identifying strategies used by Medicare Accountable Care Organizations to reduce admission rates for patients with heart failure. Dr. Lagu also is very interested in improving access to care for patients with disabilities. In 2013, she conducted a “secret shopper” survey of physicians in a variety of practice settings nationwide and found that 20% of physicians would refuse to see a patient who uses a wheelchair. This work was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and was profiled in the New York Times.

Dr. Lagu is a senior fellow in hospital medicine and also serves as a senior deputy editor for the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

Award of Clinical Leadership for Physicians

Hyung (Harry) Cho, MD, SFHM, is an academic hospitalist and the inaugural chief value officer for NYC Health + Hospitals health system, the largest public health system in the United States, serving more than 1.4 million people annually. In his previous role as the director of quality, safety and value at Mount Sinai Hospital, he founded and led the hospital high-value care committee, eventually leading more than 90 faculty, residents, and students in initiatives across the health system to improve costs and outcomes.

Nationally, he has demonstrated tremendous leadership as chair of the SHM High-Value Care Subcommittee and by leading the development of the next SHM Choosing Wisely list through collaboration with patient advocates and clinicians across the country. He is a former member of the SHM’s Chapter Support Committee and a current member of both the HQPS Committee and the editorial board for the Hospitalist.

For his work value and quality since he became a hospitalist in 2011, he has received more than 50 awards, spoken at more than 40 lectures and workshops in national venues, and been published widely in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and JAMA Internal Medicine.
 

Award of Excellence in Teaching

Christopher J. Moreland, MD, MPH, FHM, is an associate professor of medicine and hospitalist at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where he also serves as the associate residency program director. He has established himself as an outstanding clinical educator, innovator, and administrator committed to seeing medical students and residents advance their abilities.

Dr. Moreland has been involved in several initiatives and innovations. In 2011, he collaborated with the UT Health faculty development specialist to develop and direct a month-long Resident as Teacher elective. In this extremely popular elective, participants learn evidence-based principles and build skills to become effective teachers, with an emphasis on bedside teaching.

Because he is deaf himself, Dr. Moreland has continuously mentored deaf residents and health care students across North America, while advising educators who work with deaf health trainees. He published the first formal study of a subpopulation of physicians and students with a disability – hearing loss – in 2013. Dr. Moreland also has worked with standardized patients, simulation experts, and community college educators to develop a simulated trilingual intervention, with documented improvement in students’ ability to work with interpreters. He is also a fellow in hospital medicine.

Award of Excellence in Clinical Leadership for NPs/PAs

Lorraine L. Britting, MS, CNP, SFHM, is the clinical director of advanced practice providers in cardiology medicine and a practicing acute care nurse practitioner at the Cardiovascular Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She has overseen the growth of the program from 8 to 32 advanced practice providers in the last decade. Her efforts extend across the medical center, by creating and chairing multiple committees designed to address credentialing, billing, reimbursement, and recruitment issues specific to advanced practice providers.

Within SHM, she has served on the NP/PA Committee, the HQPS Committee, and Membership Committee and as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Hospital Medicine. She is a senior fellow in hospital medicine.

Award of Excellence in Humanitarian Service

Kristian Olson, MD, MPH, is an internist and pediatrician and has been an academic hospitalist member of the core educator faculty in the department of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston since its founding in 2005. He is also the director of the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies, also known as CAMTech.

In 2005, he worked in Darfur, Sudan, before being contracted by the European Commission for Humanitarian Organizations to train birth attendants in rural Sumatra after the Asian tsunami. For the next 5 years, Dr. Olson’s work resulted in creating a network of more than 350 midwives who retrain each other in newborn resuscitation and postpartum hemorrhage three times per year. He is an inventor and developer of the Augmented Infant Resuscitator, a device that lets birth attendants achieve effective ventilation in less than half the time and maintain it for 50% longer. In 2009, he was instrumental in setting up Ethiopia’s first multidrug-resistant tuberculosis treatment program, where he developed care processes and attended to patients with active TB. By 2012, more than 1,000 patients had completed therapy with an unparalleled rate of success.

Work through Dr. Olson’s CAMTech open innovation platform has empowered people with the tools to solve their own medical challenges – principally in India, Uganda, and the United States. By reaching across disciplines, he has been able to align frontline health providers to work with patients, engineers, designers, policy makers, public health practitioners and more to make sustainable solutions to challenges in health care. This platform has attracted more than 4,300 innovators and resulted in the formation of some 30 companies and the filing of more than 40 patents.

Award of Excellence in Management of Hospital Medicine

Stephanie Perry, MA, SFHM, currently the Director of Hospital Medicine Services at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, is a leader in building sustainability into the work of hospitalists. While at Virginia Mason, she developed an internal auditing and education platform to improve revenue cycle opportunities, which brought more than $500,000 in additional gross revenue to the organization in 2018.

Ms. Perry also created a structured onboarding platform for hospitalists and created a new flexible scheduling method to improve the team’s work/life balance. In partnership with her leadership team, Ms. Perry has improved hospitalist engagement scores by 29 percent over a three-year period, with 86 percent of the physicians rating as engaged employees. This has resulted in zero attrition since July of 2017. 

She is a Senior Fellow in Hospital Medicine and a true leader in her field.  

Excellence in Teamwork in Quality Improvement

The Mount Sinai Hospital’s High-Value Care team is a multidisciplinary group focused on reducing overuse, decreasing costs throughout the institution, and allowing clinicians to focus on providing outstanding care and developing relationships with their patients.

Founded by Dr. Harry Cho, the High-Value Care team has chosen projects that have meaningfully affected waste reduction and patient care. They have created a sustainable structure engaging multiple members of the care team, including staff, trainees, and students. Its collaborative environment demonstrates high value, as it helps improve staff satisfaction and retention.

The team has focused on areas identified as wasteful by SHM as part of ABIM’s Choosing Wisely initiative. Projects have decreased lab testing – including amylase, folate, and “routine” daily labs – as well as medications such antihypertensives and docusate. Additionally, teams have tackled telemetry and urinary catheters, and improved patient mobility and inpatient sleep. Their innovative work can help spark similar programs nationally. As a result, the team has greatly reduced wasteful practices, decreased costs, and allowed clinicians to focus on providing outstanding care and developing relationships with patients.

In addition to many hospitalists, the High-Value Care team consists of members of Mount Sinai’s Nursing, Medicine, Pharmacy, Laboratory and IT Departments, including Andrew Dunn, MD; Beth Raucher, MD; John McClaskey, MD; Nicole Wells; Suzanne Cushnie; Surafel Tsega; and Gina Caliendo.
 

Junior Investigator Award

Oanh Nguyen, MD, MAS, is an assistant professor in the division of hospital medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Nguyen’s research is focused on the optimization of hospital care in safety-net settings and pragmatic approaches to addressing social determinants of health and transitional care strategies that address coexisting social vulnerabilities.

Her current work, funded through a K23 award, seeks to develop a strategy to predict, understand, and address coexisting social vulnerabilities among adults hospitalized with heart failure or ischemic heart disease who are at high risk for readmission.

While she is early in her investigative career, she already has 32 peer-reviewed publications, with another four first-authored manuscripts under review or in preparation.

She is an associate editor of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

This article was updated 3/26/19.

Award of Excellence in Outstanding Service in Hospital Medicine

Kendall Rogers, MD, CPE, SFHM, is chief of the division of hospital medicine at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Albuquerque, where he also serves as a professor. His numerous innovations have tremendously improved patient care and enhanced provider work flow. One of his most notable contributions was the hospital-wide intensive organized glycemic control program, which consists of a dedicated glycemic control advanced practice provider (APP) working closely with surgical and medical teams to ensure proper education and discharge planning for patients. He also helped to create an APP fellowship in hospital medicine at the UNM Health Sciences Center.

His innovations have been recognized on the national level, including with the 2011 John M. Eisenberg Award from the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission in honor of his work as lead mentor in the SHM’s Glycemic Control Mentored Implementation program. Dr. Rogers also has served as chair of the SHM’s Information Technology Committee and has been a member of the society’s Public Policy Committee. He is also a senior fellow in hospital medicine.
 

Award of Excellence in Research

Tara Lagu, MD, MPH, is the associate director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School at Baystate Medical Center, Springfield.

Dr. Lagu has published 103 original peer-reviewed manuscripts in high-impact journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Hospital Medicine, and JAMA. Her research primarily focuses on improving the quality and value of care for patients with acute illness. She has published papers examining hospital care quality for patients with sepsis, heart failure, acute coronary syndrome, pneumonia, and delirium, and has an R01 aimed at identifying strategies used by Medicare Accountable Care Organizations to reduce admission rates for patients with heart failure. Dr. Lagu also is very interested in improving access to care for patients with disabilities. In 2013, she conducted a “secret shopper” survey of physicians in a variety of practice settings nationwide and found that 20% of physicians would refuse to see a patient who uses a wheelchair. This work was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and was profiled in the New York Times.

Dr. Lagu is a senior fellow in hospital medicine and also serves as a senior deputy editor for the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

Award of Clinical Leadership for Physicians

Hyung (Harry) Cho, MD, SFHM, is an academic hospitalist and the inaugural chief value officer for NYC Health + Hospitals health system, the largest public health system in the United States, serving more than 1.4 million people annually. In his previous role as the director of quality, safety and value at Mount Sinai Hospital, he founded and led the hospital high-value care committee, eventually leading more than 90 faculty, residents, and students in initiatives across the health system to improve costs and outcomes.

Nationally, he has demonstrated tremendous leadership as chair of the SHM High-Value Care Subcommittee and by leading the development of the next SHM Choosing Wisely list through collaboration with patient advocates and clinicians across the country. He is a former member of the SHM’s Chapter Support Committee and a current member of both the HQPS Committee and the editorial board for the Hospitalist.

For his work value and quality since he became a hospitalist in 2011, he has received more than 50 awards, spoken at more than 40 lectures and workshops in national venues, and been published widely in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and JAMA Internal Medicine.
 

Award of Excellence in Teaching

Christopher J. Moreland, MD, MPH, FHM, is an associate professor of medicine and hospitalist at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where he also serves as the associate residency program director. He has established himself as an outstanding clinical educator, innovator, and administrator committed to seeing medical students and residents advance their abilities.

Dr. Moreland has been involved in several initiatives and innovations. In 2011, he collaborated with the UT Health faculty development specialist to develop and direct a month-long Resident as Teacher elective. In this extremely popular elective, participants learn evidence-based principles and build skills to become effective teachers, with an emphasis on bedside teaching.

Because he is deaf himself, Dr. Moreland has continuously mentored deaf residents and health care students across North America, while advising educators who work with deaf health trainees. He published the first formal study of a subpopulation of physicians and students with a disability – hearing loss – in 2013. Dr. Moreland also has worked with standardized patients, simulation experts, and community college educators to develop a simulated trilingual intervention, with documented improvement in students’ ability to work with interpreters. He is also a fellow in hospital medicine.

Award of Excellence in Clinical Leadership for NPs/PAs

Lorraine L. Britting, MS, CNP, SFHM, is the clinical director of advanced practice providers in cardiology medicine and a practicing acute care nurse practitioner at the Cardiovascular Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She has overseen the growth of the program from 8 to 32 advanced practice providers in the last decade. Her efforts extend across the medical center, by creating and chairing multiple committees designed to address credentialing, billing, reimbursement, and recruitment issues specific to advanced practice providers.

Within SHM, she has served on the NP/PA Committee, the HQPS Committee, and Membership Committee and as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Hospital Medicine. She is a senior fellow in hospital medicine.

Award of Excellence in Humanitarian Service

Kristian Olson, MD, MPH, is an internist and pediatrician and has been an academic hospitalist member of the core educator faculty in the department of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston since its founding in 2005. He is also the director of the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies, also known as CAMTech.

In 2005, he worked in Darfur, Sudan, before being contracted by the European Commission for Humanitarian Organizations to train birth attendants in rural Sumatra after the Asian tsunami. For the next 5 years, Dr. Olson’s work resulted in creating a network of more than 350 midwives who retrain each other in newborn resuscitation and postpartum hemorrhage three times per year. He is an inventor and developer of the Augmented Infant Resuscitator, a device that lets birth attendants achieve effective ventilation in less than half the time and maintain it for 50% longer. In 2009, he was instrumental in setting up Ethiopia’s first multidrug-resistant tuberculosis treatment program, where he developed care processes and attended to patients with active TB. By 2012, more than 1,000 patients had completed therapy with an unparalleled rate of success.

Work through Dr. Olson’s CAMTech open innovation platform has empowered people with the tools to solve their own medical challenges – principally in India, Uganda, and the United States. By reaching across disciplines, he has been able to align frontline health providers to work with patients, engineers, designers, policy makers, public health practitioners and more to make sustainable solutions to challenges in health care. This platform has attracted more than 4,300 innovators and resulted in the formation of some 30 companies and the filing of more than 40 patents.

Award of Excellence in Management of Hospital Medicine

Stephanie Perry, MA, SFHM, currently the Director of Hospital Medicine Services at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, is a leader in building sustainability into the work of hospitalists. While at Virginia Mason, she developed an internal auditing and education platform to improve revenue cycle opportunities, which brought more than $500,000 in additional gross revenue to the organization in 2018.

Ms. Perry also created a structured onboarding platform for hospitalists and created a new flexible scheduling method to improve the team’s work/life balance. In partnership with her leadership team, Ms. Perry has improved hospitalist engagement scores by 29 percent over a three-year period, with 86 percent of the physicians rating as engaged employees. This has resulted in zero attrition since July of 2017. 

She is a Senior Fellow in Hospital Medicine and a true leader in her field.  

Excellence in Teamwork in Quality Improvement

The Mount Sinai Hospital’s High-Value Care team is a multidisciplinary group focused on reducing overuse, decreasing costs throughout the institution, and allowing clinicians to focus on providing outstanding care and developing relationships with their patients.

Founded by Dr. Harry Cho, the High-Value Care team has chosen projects that have meaningfully affected waste reduction and patient care. They have created a sustainable structure engaging multiple members of the care team, including staff, trainees, and students. Its collaborative environment demonstrates high value, as it helps improve staff satisfaction and retention.

The team has focused on areas identified as wasteful by SHM as part of ABIM’s Choosing Wisely initiative. Projects have decreased lab testing – including amylase, folate, and “routine” daily labs – as well as medications such antihypertensives and docusate. Additionally, teams have tackled telemetry and urinary catheters, and improved patient mobility and inpatient sleep. Their innovative work can help spark similar programs nationally. As a result, the team has greatly reduced wasteful practices, decreased costs, and allowed clinicians to focus on providing outstanding care and developing relationships with patients.

In addition to many hospitalists, the High-Value Care team consists of members of Mount Sinai’s Nursing, Medicine, Pharmacy, Laboratory and IT Departments, including Andrew Dunn, MD; Beth Raucher, MD; John McClaskey, MD; Nicole Wells; Suzanne Cushnie; Surafel Tsega; and Gina Caliendo.
 

Junior Investigator Award

Oanh Nguyen, MD, MAS, is an assistant professor in the division of hospital medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Nguyen’s research is focused on the optimization of hospital care in safety-net settings and pragmatic approaches to addressing social determinants of health and transitional care strategies that address coexisting social vulnerabilities.

Her current work, funded through a K23 award, seeks to develop a strategy to predict, understand, and address coexisting social vulnerabilities among adults hospitalized with heart failure or ischemic heart disease who are at high risk for readmission.

While she is early in her investigative career, she already has 32 peer-reviewed publications, with another four first-authored manuscripts under review or in preparation.

She is an associate editor of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

This article was updated 3/26/19.

Award of Excellence in Outstanding Service in Hospital Medicine

Kendall Rogers, MD, CPE, SFHM, is chief of the division of hospital medicine at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Albuquerque, where he also serves as a professor. His numerous innovations have tremendously improved patient care and enhanced provider work flow. One of his most notable contributions was the hospital-wide intensive organized glycemic control program, which consists of a dedicated glycemic control advanced practice provider (APP) working closely with surgical and medical teams to ensure proper education and discharge planning for patients. He also helped to create an APP fellowship in hospital medicine at the UNM Health Sciences Center.

His innovations have been recognized on the national level, including with the 2011 John M. Eisenberg Award from the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission in honor of his work as lead mentor in the SHM’s Glycemic Control Mentored Implementation program. Dr. Rogers also has served as chair of the SHM’s Information Technology Committee and has been a member of the society’s Public Policy Committee. He is also a senior fellow in hospital medicine.
 

Award of Excellence in Research

Tara Lagu, MD, MPH, is the associate director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School at Baystate Medical Center, Springfield.

Dr. Lagu has published 103 original peer-reviewed manuscripts in high-impact journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Hospital Medicine, and JAMA. Her research primarily focuses on improving the quality and value of care for patients with acute illness. She has published papers examining hospital care quality for patients with sepsis, heart failure, acute coronary syndrome, pneumonia, and delirium, and has an R01 aimed at identifying strategies used by Medicare Accountable Care Organizations to reduce admission rates for patients with heart failure. Dr. Lagu also is very interested in improving access to care for patients with disabilities. In 2013, she conducted a “secret shopper” survey of physicians in a variety of practice settings nationwide and found that 20% of physicians would refuse to see a patient who uses a wheelchair. This work was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and was profiled in the New York Times.

Dr. Lagu is a senior fellow in hospital medicine and also serves as a senior deputy editor for the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

Award of Clinical Leadership for Physicians

Hyung (Harry) Cho, MD, SFHM, is an academic hospitalist and the inaugural chief value officer for NYC Health + Hospitals health system, the largest public health system in the United States, serving more than 1.4 million people annually. In his previous role as the director of quality, safety and value at Mount Sinai Hospital, he founded and led the hospital high-value care committee, eventually leading more than 90 faculty, residents, and students in initiatives across the health system to improve costs and outcomes.

Nationally, he has demonstrated tremendous leadership as chair of the SHM High-Value Care Subcommittee and by leading the development of the next SHM Choosing Wisely list through collaboration with patient advocates and clinicians across the country. He is a former member of the SHM’s Chapter Support Committee and a current member of both the HQPS Committee and the editorial board for the Hospitalist.

For his work value and quality since he became a hospitalist in 2011, he has received more than 50 awards, spoken at more than 40 lectures and workshops in national venues, and been published widely in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and JAMA Internal Medicine.
 

Award of Excellence in Teaching

Christopher J. Moreland, MD, MPH, FHM, is an associate professor of medicine and hospitalist at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where he also serves as the associate residency program director. He has established himself as an outstanding clinical educator, innovator, and administrator committed to seeing medical students and residents advance their abilities.

Dr. Moreland has been involved in several initiatives and innovations. In 2011, he collaborated with the UT Health faculty development specialist to develop and direct a month-long Resident as Teacher elective. In this extremely popular elective, participants learn evidence-based principles and build skills to become effective teachers, with an emphasis on bedside teaching.

Because he is deaf himself, Dr. Moreland has continuously mentored deaf residents and health care students across North America, while advising educators who work with deaf health trainees. He published the first formal study of a subpopulation of physicians and students with a disability – hearing loss – in 2013. Dr. Moreland also has worked with standardized patients, simulation experts, and community college educators to develop a simulated trilingual intervention, with documented improvement in students’ ability to work with interpreters. He is also a fellow in hospital medicine.

Award of Excellence in Clinical Leadership for NPs/PAs

Lorraine L. Britting, MS, CNP, SFHM, is the clinical director of advanced practice providers in cardiology medicine and a practicing acute care nurse practitioner at the Cardiovascular Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She has overseen the growth of the program from 8 to 32 advanced practice providers in the last decade. Her efforts extend across the medical center, by creating and chairing multiple committees designed to address credentialing, billing, reimbursement, and recruitment issues specific to advanced practice providers.

Within SHM, she has served on the NP/PA Committee, the HQPS Committee, and Membership Committee and as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Hospital Medicine. She is a senior fellow in hospital medicine.

Award of Excellence in Humanitarian Service

Kristian Olson, MD, MPH, is an internist and pediatrician and has been an academic hospitalist member of the core educator faculty in the department of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston since its founding in 2005. He is also the director of the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies, also known as CAMTech.

In 2005, he worked in Darfur, Sudan, before being contracted by the European Commission for Humanitarian Organizations to train birth attendants in rural Sumatra after the Asian tsunami. For the next 5 years, Dr. Olson’s work resulted in creating a network of more than 350 midwives who retrain each other in newborn resuscitation and postpartum hemorrhage three times per year. He is an inventor and developer of the Augmented Infant Resuscitator, a device that lets birth attendants achieve effective ventilation in less than half the time and maintain it for 50% longer. In 2009, he was instrumental in setting up Ethiopia’s first multidrug-resistant tuberculosis treatment program, where he developed care processes and attended to patients with active TB. By 2012, more than 1,000 patients had completed therapy with an unparalleled rate of success.

Work through Dr. Olson’s CAMTech open innovation platform has empowered people with the tools to solve their own medical challenges – principally in India, Uganda, and the United States. By reaching across disciplines, he has been able to align frontline health providers to work with patients, engineers, designers, policy makers, public health practitioners and more to make sustainable solutions to challenges in health care. This platform has attracted more than 4,300 innovators and resulted in the formation of some 30 companies and the filing of more than 40 patents.

Award of Excellence in Management of Hospital Medicine

Stephanie Perry, MA, SFHM, currently the Director of Hospital Medicine Services at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, is a leader in building sustainability into the work of hospitalists. While at Virginia Mason, she developed an internal auditing and education platform to improve revenue cycle opportunities, which brought more than $500,000 in additional gross revenue to the organization in 2018.

Ms. Perry also created a structured onboarding platform for hospitalists and created a new flexible scheduling method to improve the team’s work/life balance. In partnership with her leadership team, Ms. Perry has improved hospitalist engagement scores by 29 percent over a three-year period, with 86 percent of the physicians rating as engaged employees. This has resulted in zero attrition since July of 2017. 

She is a Senior Fellow in Hospital Medicine and a true leader in her field.  

Excellence in Teamwork in Quality Improvement

The Mount Sinai Hospital’s High-Value Care team is a multidisciplinary group focused on reducing overuse, decreasing costs throughout the institution, and allowing clinicians to focus on providing outstanding care and developing relationships with their patients.

Founded by Dr. Harry Cho, the High-Value Care team has chosen projects that have meaningfully affected waste reduction and patient care. They have created a sustainable structure engaging multiple members of the care team, including staff, trainees, and students. Its collaborative environment demonstrates high value, as it helps improve staff satisfaction and retention.

The team has focused on areas identified as wasteful by SHM as part of ABIM’s Choosing Wisely initiative. Projects have decreased lab testing – including amylase, folate, and “routine” daily labs – as well as medications such antihypertensives and docusate. Additionally, teams have tackled telemetry and urinary catheters, and improved patient mobility and inpatient sleep. Their innovative work can help spark similar programs nationally. As a result, the team has greatly reduced wasteful practices, decreased costs, and allowed clinicians to focus on providing outstanding care and developing relationships with patients.

In addition to many hospitalists, the High-Value Care team consists of members of Mount Sinai’s Nursing, Medicine, Pharmacy, Laboratory and IT Departments, including Andrew Dunn, MD; Beth Raucher, MD; John McClaskey, MD; Nicole Wells; Suzanne Cushnie; Surafel Tsega; and Gina Caliendo.
 

Junior Investigator Award

Oanh Nguyen, MD, MAS, is an assistant professor in the division of hospital medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Nguyen’s research is focused on the optimization of hospital care in safety-net settings and pragmatic approaches to addressing social determinants of health and transitional care strategies that address coexisting social vulnerabilities.

Her current work, funded through a K23 award, seeks to develop a strategy to predict, understand, and address coexisting social vulnerabilities among adults hospitalized with heart failure or ischemic heart disease who are at high risk for readmission.

While she is early in her investigative career, she already has 32 peer-reviewed publications, with another four first-authored manuscripts under review or in preparation.

She is an associate editor of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

This article was updated 3/26/19.

You won’t want to miss Tuesday’s keynote speaker at HM19. Tait Shanafelt, MD, a hematologist, oncologist, and translational researcher of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, will discuss “clinician well-being” – a research interest of his for almost 20 years.

“A small study that I led as a resident was one of the first to look at the relationship between clinicians’ own well-being and how it impacted the care they provide patients,” he said in an interview. “That study was a real lightning rod; it got coverage everywhere – the cover of USA Today, Paul Harvey’s show. It was done by this junior person with great mentorship, and here it was galvanizing a national conversation, and I remember wondering, ‘Why is it the case? We’ve known about this in an anecdotal way for a long time.’ But we had studied it in a methodologically rigorous way, using good scientific practices, and that had allowed this to change the conversation.”

At HM19, Dr. Shanafelt will share his thoughts about where we are today with our understanding of the clinician’s experience: What are the main drivers of both distress and professional fulfillment for clinicians? “I’ll really focus on the organizational and system-level approaches that we need to be improving to make meaningful progress in reducing burnout and distress and cultivating professional fulfillment,” he said.

For too long, Dr. Shanafelt added, we’ve approached this as a problem of personal resilience, which has implied to clinicians that they just need to take better care of themselves – sleep more, exercise, do yoga. “There’s nothing wrong with those things, but they don’t address the root cause of this problem, and they will not make a meaningful dent in burnout,” he said.

Instead, we should look at the characteristics of the practice environment – whether the environment makes it easy to do the right things and provide the care patients need or whether it erects barriers to those things, barriers clinicians then have to overcome. “Can we design work flows, processes, and so forth that reduce low-value work and allow clinicians to spend more of their professional effort on the piece that only they can do: making key medical decisions, counseling patients, supporting patients?”

We know now that the well-being and professional fulfillment of clinicians is a fundamental driver of quality of care and has profound financial implications for our organizations, Dr. Shanafelt affirmed.

“This isn’t just that we want happy people here; this is fundamental if we want to achieve our mission as health care organizations,” he said. “We can’t have quality of care if we have a burned-out clinician work force. We also know now, with data from Stanford [(Calif.) University] and the Cleveland Clinic, that there is a strong relationship between burnout, turnover, and productivity and that there is a clear financial cost to the health care organization such that it merits investment of resources to bend that curve. As we start to make those investments, how do we deploy that resource to do the most good within our organizations and really transform our organizational environment and culture?”

The High Cost of Clinician Burnout: Organizational Approaches to Clinician Well-Being
Tait Shanafelt, MD
Tuesday, 9:10 – 10:00 a.m.
Potomac ABCD

You won’t want to miss Tuesday’s keynote speaker at HM19. Tait Shanafelt, MD, a hematologist, oncologist, and translational researcher of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, will discuss “clinician well-being” – a research interest of his for almost 20 years.

“A small study that I led as a resident was one of the first to look at the relationship between clinicians’ own well-being and how it impacted the care they provide patients,” he said in an interview. “That study was a real lightning rod; it got coverage everywhere – the cover of USA Today, Paul Harvey’s show. It was done by this junior person with great mentorship, and here it was galvanizing a national conversation, and I remember wondering, ‘Why is it the case? We’ve known about this in an anecdotal way for a long time.’ But we had studied it in a methodologically rigorous way, using good scientific practices, and that had allowed this to change the conversation.”

At HM19, Dr. Shanafelt will share his thoughts about where we are today with our understanding of the clinician’s experience: What are the main drivers of both distress and professional fulfillment for clinicians? “I’ll really focus on the organizational and system-level approaches that we need to be improving to make meaningful progress in reducing burnout and distress and cultivating professional fulfillment,” he said.

For too long, Dr. Shanafelt added, we’ve approached this as a problem of personal resilience, which has implied to clinicians that they just need to take better care of themselves – sleep more, exercise, do yoga. “There’s nothing wrong with those things, but they don’t address the root cause of this problem, and they will not make a meaningful dent in burnout,” he said.

Instead, we should look at the characteristics of the practice environment – whether the environment makes it easy to do the right things and provide the care patients need or whether it erects barriers to those things, barriers clinicians then have to overcome. “Can we design work flows, processes, and so forth that reduce low-value work and allow clinicians to spend more of their professional effort on the piece that only they can do: making key medical decisions, counseling patients, supporting patients?”

We know now that the well-being and professional fulfillment of clinicians is a fundamental driver of quality of care and has profound financial implications for our organizations, Dr. Shanafelt affirmed.

“This isn’t just that we want happy people here; this is fundamental if we want to achieve our mission as health care organizations,” he said. “We can’t have quality of care if we have a burned-out clinician work force. We also know now, with data from Stanford [(Calif.) University] and the Cleveland Clinic, that there is a strong relationship between burnout, turnover, and productivity and that there is a clear financial cost to the health care organization such that it merits investment of resources to bend that curve. As we start to make those investments, how do we deploy that resource to do the most good within our organizations and really transform our organizational environment and culture?”

The High Cost of Clinician Burnout: Organizational Approaches to Clinician Well-Being
Tait Shanafelt, MD
Tuesday, 9:10 – 10:00 a.m.
Potomac ABCD

You won’t want to miss Tuesday’s keynote speaker at HM19. Tait Shanafelt, MD, a hematologist, oncologist, and translational researcher of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, will discuss “clinician well-being” – a research interest of his for almost 20 years.

“A small study that I led as a resident was one of the first to look at the relationship between clinicians’ own well-being and how it impacted the care they provide patients,” he said in an interview. “That study was a real lightning rod; it got coverage everywhere – the cover of USA Today, Paul Harvey’s show. It was done by this junior person with great mentorship, and here it was galvanizing a national conversation, and I remember wondering, ‘Why is it the case? We’ve known about this in an anecdotal way for a long time.’ But we had studied it in a methodologically rigorous way, using good scientific practices, and that had allowed this to change the conversation.”

At HM19, Dr. Shanafelt will share his thoughts about where we are today with our understanding of the clinician’s experience: What are the main drivers of both distress and professional fulfillment for clinicians? “I’ll really focus on the organizational and system-level approaches that we need to be improving to make meaningful progress in reducing burnout and distress and cultivating professional fulfillment,” he said.

For too long, Dr. Shanafelt added, we’ve approached this as a problem of personal resilience, which has implied to clinicians that they just need to take better care of themselves – sleep more, exercise, do yoga. “There’s nothing wrong with those things, but they don’t address the root cause of this problem, and they will not make a meaningful dent in burnout,” he said.

Instead, we should look at the characteristics of the practice environment – whether the environment makes it easy to do the right things and provide the care patients need or whether it erects barriers to those things, barriers clinicians then have to overcome. “Can we design work flows, processes, and so forth that reduce low-value work and allow clinicians to spend more of their professional effort on the piece that only they can do: making key medical decisions, counseling patients, supporting patients?”

We know now that the well-being and professional fulfillment of clinicians is a fundamental driver of quality of care and has profound financial implications for our organizations, Dr. Shanafelt affirmed.

“This isn’t just that we want happy people here; this is fundamental if we want to achieve our mission as health care organizations,” he said. “We can’t have quality of care if we have a burned-out clinician work force. We also know now, with data from Stanford [(Calif.) University] and the Cleveland Clinic, that there is a strong relationship between burnout, turnover, and productivity and that there is a clear financial cost to the health care organization such that it merits investment of resources to bend that curve. As we start to make those investments, how do we deploy that resource to do the most good within our organizations and really transform our organizational environment and culture?”

The High Cost of Clinician Burnout: Organizational Approaches to Clinician Well-Being
Tait Shanafelt, MD
Tuesday, 9:10 – 10:00 a.m.
Potomac ABCD

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 1
Reduction in the risk of stroke and systemic embolism in patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF)
Speaker: Charles J. Dow, MD, FACC, cardiologist, Harvard Medical School, Boston
Sponsored by Pfizer

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 2
Improving Outcomes for Hospitalized Patients with HFrEF: Looking Beyond Stabilization
Speaker: Jennifer Brown, MD
Medstar Cardiology Associates
Annapolis, MD
Sponsored by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 3
The Role of the Hospital Medicine Specialist in Managing Transitions of Care in Acute Coronary Syndrome
Speaker: John Venditto, MD, MBA, senior medical director, cardiovascular metabolic disease,
U.S. Medical Affairs – AstraZeneca
Sponsored by AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 1
Reduction in the risk of stroke and systemic embolism in patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF)
Speaker: Charles J. Dow, MD, FACC, cardiologist, Harvard Medical School, Boston
Sponsored by Pfizer

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 2
Improving Outcomes for Hospitalized Patients with HFrEF: Looking Beyond Stabilization
Speaker: Jennifer Brown, MD
Medstar Cardiology Associates
Annapolis, MD
Sponsored by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 3
The Role of the Hospital Medicine Specialist in Managing Transitions of Care in Acute Coronary Syndrome
Speaker: John Venditto, MD, MBA, senior medical director, cardiovascular metabolic disease,
U.S. Medical Affairs – AstraZeneca
Sponsored by AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 1
Reduction in the risk of stroke and systemic embolism in patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF)
Speaker: Charles J. Dow, MD, FACC, cardiologist, Harvard Medical School, Boston
Sponsored by Pfizer

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 2
Improving Outcomes for Hospitalized Patients with HFrEF: Looking Beyond Stabilization
Speaker: Jennifer Brown, MD
Medstar Cardiology Associates
Annapolis, MD
Sponsored by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.

12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Product Theater 3
The Role of the Hospital Medicine Specialist in Managing Transitions of Care in Acute Coronary Syndrome
Speaker: John Venditto, MD, MBA, senior medical director, cardiovascular metabolic disease,
U.S. Medical Affairs – AstraZeneca
Sponsored by AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP

A patient is having a medical emergency and is having difficulty breathing. If the airway isn’t managed well, the consequences could be tragic. If asked to step in, would you? Could you?

More hospitalists are being faced with this situation, said Joshua Lenchus, DO, RPh, SFHM, chief medical officer at the Broward Health Medical Center in South Florida. But when they are, they tend to be hesitant – usually with good reason, since training is frequently lacking.

Dr. Lenchus and a group of five other physicians who are experienced in airway management led 25 hospitalists in emergent airway management training on Monday at HM19, a first-of-its-kind session at the annual conference.

“Not all facilities that hospitalists practice at would require or even ask a hospitalist to step into a situation like this,” said Dr. Lenchus, who oversaw the training. “But as you walk around the exhibit hall at SHM, you find that of the locum tenens companies that ask for hospitalists to perform procedures, airway management is very high on the list.”

The trainers were Armando Ariza Giammaria, MD, an anesthesiologist and clinical assistant professor at Tulane University, New Orleans; Jorge Cabrera, DO, an intensivist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami; Alice Gallo de Moraes, MD, a pulmonary critical care doctor at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.; Fernando Caceres, MD, a pulmonary critical care specialist at the Billings (Mont.) Clinic; and Aldo Pavon Canseco, MD, a hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami who was trained as a pediatric anesthesiologist.

Over 3 hours, hospitalists first heard tips for airway management, with words of caution, and then did hands-on work using manikins under the guidance of the faculty members with a low trainee-to-instructor ratio.

“Do the basics well and the scary things will become manageable,” Dr. Cabrera said in the session.

Instructors said it was vital to have a checklist in the form of a mnemonic device, and to have not just Plan A for clearing an airway, but Plans B and C, too.

Dr. Ariza told the learners not to focus too much on intubation — it’s not always necessary. In fact, he said he couldn’t over-emphasize the importance of mastering bag-mask ventilation, a go-to method when other approaches fail.

Participants learned about devices that can be deployed through the nose to keep the airway clear, those that can be used in the mouth but that might not go down quite as far as the lung, an inflatable bag that can be placed over patients’ mouths and squeezed to help with their breathing, and endotracheal tubes.

Dr. Lenchus said that more training would likely be needed for most clinicians – perhaps with other faculty at their own institutions – before they could be expected to employ these techniques in a real-life emergency situation.

A patient is having a medical emergency and is having difficulty breathing. If the airway isn’t managed well, the consequences could be tragic. If asked to step in, would you? Could you?

More hospitalists are being faced with this situation, said Joshua Lenchus, DO, RPh, SFHM, chief medical officer at the Broward Health Medical Center in South Florida. But when they are, they tend to be hesitant – usually with good reason, since training is frequently lacking.

Dr. Lenchus and a group of five other physicians who are experienced in airway management led 25 hospitalists in emergent airway management training on Monday at HM19, a first-of-its-kind session at the annual conference.

“Not all facilities that hospitalists practice at would require or even ask a hospitalist to step into a situation like this,” said Dr. Lenchus, who oversaw the training. “But as you walk around the exhibit hall at SHM, you find that of the locum tenens companies that ask for hospitalists to perform procedures, airway management is very high on the list.”

The trainers were Armando Ariza Giammaria, MD, an anesthesiologist and clinical assistant professor at Tulane University, New Orleans; Jorge Cabrera, DO, an intensivist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami; Alice Gallo de Moraes, MD, a pulmonary critical care doctor at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.; Fernando Caceres, MD, a pulmonary critical care specialist at the Billings (Mont.) Clinic; and Aldo Pavon Canseco, MD, a hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami who was trained as a pediatric anesthesiologist.

Over 3 hours, hospitalists first heard tips for airway management, with words of caution, and then did hands-on work using manikins under the guidance of the faculty members with a low trainee-to-instructor ratio.

“Do the basics well and the scary things will become manageable,” Dr. Cabrera said in the session.

Instructors said it was vital to have a checklist in the form of a mnemonic device, and to have not just Plan A for clearing an airway, but Plans B and C, too.

Dr. Ariza told the learners not to focus too much on intubation — it’s not always necessary. In fact, he said he couldn’t over-emphasize the importance of mastering bag-mask ventilation, a go-to method when other approaches fail.

Participants learned about devices that can be deployed through the nose to keep the airway clear, those that can be used in the mouth but that might not go down quite as far as the lung, an inflatable bag that can be placed over patients’ mouths and squeezed to help with their breathing, and endotracheal tubes.

Dr. Lenchus said that more training would likely be needed for most clinicians – perhaps with other faculty at their own institutions – before they could be expected to employ these techniques in a real-life emergency situation.

A patient is having a medical emergency and is having difficulty breathing. If the airway isn’t managed well, the consequences could be tragic. If asked to step in, would you? Could you?

More hospitalists are being faced with this situation, said Joshua Lenchus, DO, RPh, SFHM, chief medical officer at the Broward Health Medical Center in South Florida. But when they are, they tend to be hesitant – usually with good reason, since training is frequently lacking.

Dr. Lenchus and a group of five other physicians who are experienced in airway management led 25 hospitalists in emergent airway management training on Monday at HM19, a first-of-its-kind session at the annual conference.

“Not all facilities that hospitalists practice at would require or even ask a hospitalist to step into a situation like this,” said Dr. Lenchus, who oversaw the training. “But as you walk around the exhibit hall at SHM, you find that of the locum tenens companies that ask for hospitalists to perform procedures, airway management is very high on the list.”

The trainers were Armando Ariza Giammaria, MD, an anesthesiologist and clinical assistant professor at Tulane University, New Orleans; Jorge Cabrera, DO, an intensivist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami; Alice Gallo de Moraes, MD, a pulmonary critical care doctor at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.; Fernando Caceres, MD, a pulmonary critical care specialist at the Billings (Mont.) Clinic; and Aldo Pavon Canseco, MD, a hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami who was trained as a pediatric anesthesiologist.

Over 3 hours, hospitalists first heard tips for airway management, with words of caution, and then did hands-on work using manikins under the guidance of the faculty members with a low trainee-to-instructor ratio.

“Do the basics well and the scary things will become manageable,” Dr. Cabrera said in the session.

Instructors said it was vital to have a checklist in the form of a mnemonic device, and to have not just Plan A for clearing an airway, but Plans B and C, too.

Dr. Ariza told the learners not to focus too much on intubation — it’s not always necessary. In fact, he said he couldn’t over-emphasize the importance of mastering bag-mask ventilation, a go-to method when other approaches fail.

Participants learned about devices that can be deployed through the nose to keep the airway clear, those that can be used in the mouth but that might not go down quite as far as the lung, an inflatable bag that can be placed over patients’ mouths and squeezed to help with their breathing, and endotracheal tubes.

Dr. Lenchus said that more training would likely be needed for most clinicians – perhaps with other faculty at their own institutions – before they could be expected to employ these techniques in a real-life emergency situation.

HM19 attendees explain why they became hospitalists.

Vidyard Video

HM19 attendees explain why they became hospitalists.

Vidyard Video

HM19 attendees explain why they became hospitalists.

Vidyard Video

When Andrew Auerbach, MD, MPH, SFHM, started as a hospitalist, his specialty didn’t have a name. His title was simply “medical director.” Now, 2 decades later, he is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the most experienced and influential hospitalists in the field.

SHM will honor Dr. Auerbach and celebrate his achievements today at HM19, at the Awards plenary following the Chapter Awards of Excellence ceremony that begins at 8:30 a.m. SHM president Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, will present him with a plaque and review his contributions to the growth of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

Throughout his career, even going back to the days he helped to found the Society of Hospital Medicine, Dr. Auerbach has played a crucial role in defining how a hospitalist works and thinks. Over the last 7 years, he led the Journal of Hospital Medicine through an extraordinary period of growth that has secured its reputation as a crucial resource for hospitalists and beyond.

“Andy Auerbach transformed the Journal of Hospital Medicine from the status of a ‘start-up’ Version 1.0 to a polished, efficient machine – Version 2.0. His efforts garnered the national respect that JHM deserves,” said Mark Williams, MD, MHM, University of Kentucky HealthCare hospital medicine division chief and tenured professor of medicine. Dr. Williams served as editor in chief of the journal immediately prior to Dr. Auerbach. “I hope Andy will be known as the editor who transformed an acceptable journal into a stellar example of what a medical journal can become.”

Samir S. Shah, MD, MSCE, MHM, who has replaced Dr. Auerbach as editor in chief of the journal, also has praise for his predecessor. “Andy has really invested in advancing scholarship in hospital medicine and ensuring that great work is broadly disseminated,” said Dr. Shah, chief of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Dr. Auerbach said his interest in inpatient and perioperative care sparked his focus on hospital medicine. “My initial research was foundational for the field. I wanted to understand, refine, and improve our role: Do hospitalists improve care and outcomes? Do they affect patient perceptions of their doctors?”

At the time, hospital medicine felt like a 1990s dot-com startup, he recalled, but one that was destined to last. “It was clear that hospital medicine was going to take off, but the academic pursuits were taking longer to get going. We were starting from zero.”

Enter the Journal of Hospital Medicine. The publication received about 200 submissions a year when Dr. Auerbach took over as editor in chief. Now, it receives more than 800.

The higher number of submissions allows editors to be more selective about the papers that are published. At the same time, the growth in the journal’s profile and influence has allowed it to evolve into a more wide-ranging publication, Dr. Auerbach said.

“Geriatricians and nephrologists are sending us papers,” he said. “They believe our work is important, and they understand that we’re publishing research about topics such as acute kidney injury, delirium, inpatient safety issues, and transfer of care.”

According to Dr. Williams, his successor has played a crucial role in the journal’s success. “Andy improved the response rate of JHM, dramatically shortening the time for reviews while maintaining and even improving the quality of reviews,” he said. “This single act profoundly impacted author satisfaction and drove the increased number of article submissions.”

Dr. Auerbach also revolutionized the journal’s approach to technology. “Under his leadership, the journal pioneered the use of social media to engage readers in ways that were fundamentally different from established processes at the time,” said new editor in chief Dr. Shah. “For example, the journal has created roles for social media editors, and it routinely publishes visual abstracts to provide readers with a quick overview of journal research. We also hold regular dialogues with readers via our #JHMChat Twitter journal club to engage them in discussing the latest research published in JHM.”

Dr. Shah also noted that Dr. Auerbach boosted hospital medicine and the journal in other ways during his tenure. “He encouraged the team of editors to engage with our authors in meaningful and substantive ways. That meant encouraging thoughtful feedback and also reaching out to authors directly to provide additional guidance as they revised their manuscript and, oftentimes, as they prepared to submit their manuscript elsewhere,” he said.

In addition, Dr. Shah said that his colleague “also created the JHM editorial fellowship as a way to help develop the pipeline for academic leadership. This fellowship provides chief residents, academic hospital medicine fellows, and junior faculty an opportunity to learn about medical publishing, hone their skills in evaluating research and writing, and network with leaders in the field.”

For his part, Dr. Auerbach hopes his legacy at the journal will include an expansion, perhaps within a year or 2. “I’d love to see the journal come out twice a month,” he said. “There’s enough potential science out there, and I think it could be in that position soon.”

Awards of Excellence
Tuesday, 8:30 – 9:10 a.m.
Potomac ABCD

When Andrew Auerbach, MD, MPH, SFHM, started as a hospitalist, his specialty didn’t have a name. His title was simply “medical director.” Now, 2 decades later, he is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the most experienced and influential hospitalists in the field.

SHM will honor Dr. Auerbach and celebrate his achievements today at HM19, at the Awards plenary following the Chapter Awards of Excellence ceremony that begins at 8:30 a.m. SHM president Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, will present him with a plaque and review his contributions to the growth of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

Throughout his career, even going back to the days he helped to found the Society of Hospital Medicine, Dr. Auerbach has played a crucial role in defining how a hospitalist works and thinks. Over the last 7 years, he led the Journal of Hospital Medicine through an extraordinary period of growth that has secured its reputation as a crucial resource for hospitalists and beyond.

“Andy Auerbach transformed the Journal of Hospital Medicine from the status of a ‘start-up’ Version 1.0 to a polished, efficient machine – Version 2.0. His efforts garnered the national respect that JHM deserves,” said Mark Williams, MD, MHM, University of Kentucky HealthCare hospital medicine division chief and tenured professor of medicine. Dr. Williams served as editor in chief of the journal immediately prior to Dr. Auerbach. “I hope Andy will be known as the editor who transformed an acceptable journal into a stellar example of what a medical journal can become.”

Samir S. Shah, MD, MSCE, MHM, who has replaced Dr. Auerbach as editor in chief of the journal, also has praise for his predecessor. “Andy has really invested in advancing scholarship in hospital medicine and ensuring that great work is broadly disseminated,” said Dr. Shah, chief of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Dr. Auerbach said his interest in inpatient and perioperative care sparked his focus on hospital medicine. “My initial research was foundational for the field. I wanted to understand, refine, and improve our role: Do hospitalists improve care and outcomes? Do they affect patient perceptions of their doctors?”

At the time, hospital medicine felt like a 1990s dot-com startup, he recalled, but one that was destined to last. “It was clear that hospital medicine was going to take off, but the academic pursuits were taking longer to get going. We were starting from zero.”

Enter the Journal of Hospital Medicine. The publication received about 200 submissions a year when Dr. Auerbach took over as editor in chief. Now, it receives more than 800.

The higher number of submissions allows editors to be more selective about the papers that are published. At the same time, the growth in the journal’s profile and influence has allowed it to evolve into a more wide-ranging publication, Dr. Auerbach said.

“Geriatricians and nephrologists are sending us papers,” he said. “They believe our work is important, and they understand that we’re publishing research about topics such as acute kidney injury, delirium, inpatient safety issues, and transfer of care.”

According to Dr. Williams, his successor has played a crucial role in the journal’s success. “Andy improved the response rate of JHM, dramatically shortening the time for reviews while maintaining and even improving the quality of reviews,” he said. “This single act profoundly impacted author satisfaction and drove the increased number of article submissions.”

Dr. Auerbach also revolutionized the journal’s approach to technology. “Under his leadership, the journal pioneered the use of social media to engage readers in ways that were fundamentally different from established processes at the time,” said new editor in chief Dr. Shah. “For example, the journal has created roles for social media editors, and it routinely publishes visual abstracts to provide readers with a quick overview of journal research. We also hold regular dialogues with readers via our #JHMChat Twitter journal club to engage them in discussing the latest research published in JHM.”

Dr. Shah also noted that Dr. Auerbach boosted hospital medicine and the journal in other ways during his tenure. “He encouraged the team of editors to engage with our authors in meaningful and substantive ways. That meant encouraging thoughtful feedback and also reaching out to authors directly to provide additional guidance as they revised their manuscript and, oftentimes, as they prepared to submit their manuscript elsewhere,” he said.

In addition, Dr. Shah said that his colleague “also created the JHM editorial fellowship as a way to help develop the pipeline for academic leadership. This fellowship provides chief residents, academic hospital medicine fellows, and junior faculty an opportunity to learn about medical publishing, hone their skills in evaluating research and writing, and network with leaders in the field.”

For his part, Dr. Auerbach hopes his legacy at the journal will include an expansion, perhaps within a year or 2. “I’d love to see the journal come out twice a month,” he said. “There’s enough potential science out there, and I think it could be in that position soon.”

Awards of Excellence
Tuesday, 8:30 – 9:10 a.m.
Potomac ABCD

When Andrew Auerbach, MD, MPH, SFHM, started as a hospitalist, his specialty didn’t have a name. His title was simply “medical director.” Now, 2 decades later, he is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the most experienced and influential hospitalists in the field.

SHM will honor Dr. Auerbach and celebrate his achievements today at HM19, at the Awards plenary following the Chapter Awards of Excellence ceremony that begins at 8:30 a.m. SHM president Nasim Afsar, MD, SFHM, will present him with a plaque and review his contributions to the growth of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

Throughout his career, even going back to the days he helped to found the Society of Hospital Medicine, Dr. Auerbach has played a crucial role in defining how a hospitalist works and thinks. Over the last 7 years, he led the Journal of Hospital Medicine through an extraordinary period of growth that has secured its reputation as a crucial resource for hospitalists and beyond.

“Andy Auerbach transformed the Journal of Hospital Medicine from the status of a ‘start-up’ Version 1.0 to a polished, efficient machine – Version 2.0. His efforts garnered the national respect that JHM deserves,” said Mark Williams, MD, MHM, University of Kentucky HealthCare hospital medicine division chief and tenured professor of medicine. Dr. Williams served as editor in chief of the journal immediately prior to Dr. Auerbach. “I hope Andy will be known as the editor who transformed an acceptable journal into a stellar example of what a medical journal can become.”

Samir S. Shah, MD, MSCE, MHM, who has replaced Dr. Auerbach as editor in chief of the journal, also has praise for his predecessor. “Andy has really invested in advancing scholarship in hospital medicine and ensuring that great work is broadly disseminated,” said Dr. Shah, chief of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Dr. Auerbach said his interest in inpatient and perioperative care sparked his focus on hospital medicine. “My initial research was foundational for the field. I wanted to understand, refine, and improve our role: Do hospitalists improve care and outcomes? Do they affect patient perceptions of their doctors?”

At the time, hospital medicine felt like a 1990s dot-com startup, he recalled, but one that was destined to last. “It was clear that hospital medicine was going to take off, but the academic pursuits were taking longer to get going. We were starting from zero.”

Enter the Journal of Hospital Medicine. The publication received about 200 submissions a year when Dr. Auerbach took over as editor in chief. Now, it receives more than 800.

The higher number of submissions allows editors to be more selective about the papers that are published. At the same time, the growth in the journal’s profile and influence has allowed it to evolve into a more wide-ranging publication, Dr. Auerbach said.

“Geriatricians and nephrologists are sending us papers,” he said. “They believe our work is important, and they understand that we’re publishing research about topics such as acute kidney injury, delirium, inpatient safety issues, and transfer of care.”

According to Dr. Williams, his successor has played a crucial role in the journal’s success. “Andy improved the response rate of JHM, dramatically shortening the time for reviews while maintaining and even improving the quality of reviews,” he said. “This single act profoundly impacted author satisfaction and drove the increased number of article submissions.”

Dr. Auerbach also revolutionized the journal’s approach to technology. “Under his leadership, the journal pioneered the use of social media to engage readers in ways that were fundamentally different from established processes at the time,” said new editor in chief Dr. Shah. “For example, the journal has created roles for social media editors, and it routinely publishes visual abstracts to provide readers with a quick overview of journal research. We also hold regular dialogues with readers via our #JHMChat Twitter journal club to engage them in discussing the latest research published in JHM.”

Dr. Shah also noted that Dr. Auerbach boosted hospital medicine and the journal in other ways during his tenure. “He encouraged the team of editors to engage with our authors in meaningful and substantive ways. That meant encouraging thoughtful feedback and also reaching out to authors directly to provide additional guidance as they revised their manuscript and, oftentimes, as they prepared to submit their manuscript elsewhere,” he said.

In addition, Dr. Shah said that his colleague “also created the JHM editorial fellowship as a way to help develop the pipeline for academic leadership. This fellowship provides chief residents, academic hospital medicine fellows, and junior faculty an opportunity to learn about medical publishing, hone their skills in evaluating research and writing, and network with leaders in the field.”

For his part, Dr. Auerbach hopes his legacy at the journal will include an expansion, perhaps within a year or 2. “I’d love to see the journal come out twice a month,” he said. “There’s enough potential science out there, and I think it could be in that position soon.”

Awards of Excellence
Tuesday, 8:30 – 9:10 a.m.
Potomac ABCD