Background: Podcasts geared towards clinicians are increasing in popularity. While there are several podcasts that garner a high listenership the general internal medicine community , few podcasts are tailored specifically to hospitalists.
Purpose: Our overall goal was to develop and launch a new podcast designed for hospitalists to provide clinical updates as well as interviews with consultants on specialty updates regarding inpatient practice. The specific aims were to identify a format, structure, and frequency that would suit the needs and interests of hospitalists in our group.
Description: We began by surveying hospitalists in our division of hospital medicine, a group with approximately 150 faculty practicing in an urban academic health system. The survey obtained information about current podcast listening habits, preferred ways of learning, and topics they would want to hear about in a hospital medicine–oriented podcast (Figure 1). We found that faculty most wanted to hear about practice changing clinical updates, subspecialist and consultant topics relevant to hospital medicine, discussion regarding pre-consultation workup, and clinical and educational updates most relevant to working with trainees rotating on inpatient services. Next, we established a format tailored to the preferences of the group: biweekly, short-form (10-20 minutes), and available on most podcast delivery services including Spotify and Apple. Podcasts were designed to cover 1-3 topics each and were discussed by a single guest host alternating with subspecialist/consultant interviewees and guest hosts. Content for the podcasts was developed by a team of hospitalists and included a mix of interviews with consultants targeting a specific topic or clinical update, and practice-changing updates sourced from medical journals, grand rounds, conferences, and clinical update seminars. Post-production audio editing, graphic production and distribution was achieved using a combination of free, open sourced, and subscription services. Production times have been reduced through the generation of tracks that allow hosts to insert clinical content to produce a final product. Our podcast, named “Booster Shots” (available at http://bit.ly/boostershotsucsf), has been officially launched and there have been 13 episodes released as of November 2023, garnering ~900 listens. New episodes are publicized internally through the divisional newsletter and email listservs.
Conclusions: We successfully developed and launched a new, short-form, clinically-oriented podcast for hospitalists. Pilot testing of the podcast revealed the feasibility of this program and we are now working on next steps in development, including iteratively improving on content, granting credit for continuing medical education (CME) and expanding listenership.
