Background: Hospital medicine is the fastest growing subspecialty within internal medicine, growing from 10,000 hospitalists in 2002 to over 50,000 in 2016. Despite this growth, there remain relatively few hospitalists who are clinician investigators. We sought to quantify the number of clinician investigators, their dedicated time for research at major United States academic medical centers, [...]

Background: Optimal patient care requires excellent patient communication skills. These skills are associated with improved patient satisfaction and adherence and may positively impact overall patient care and reduction in readmissions. Standardized patients (SPs) are commonly used in Undergraduate and Graduate Medical Education; however, their use for faculty education is uncommon, despite being considered an effective [...]

Background: Academic medical centers (AMCs) have experienced significant clinical growth and have responded to the increase clinical demand by growing the number of hospital medicine services.[1,2] While this unprecedented growth has occurred, it has often outpaced the growth of housestaff training programs which has led to academic hospitalist teams evolving their clinical and educational models [...]

Background: It is well established that there is a persistent gender gap in promotion in academic medicine despite an equal number of male and female medical students for the past 20 years. Possible mediators of this gender gap include differences between men and women in years on faculty, measures of productivity such as number of [...]

Background: Staffing of inpatient medicine services with Advanced Practice Providers (APPs), including physician assistants and nurse practitioners, is becoming increasingly common at academic medical centers across the United States. The various roles filled by APPs have not been well-described in the literature. The purpose of this study is to better characterize how APPs are utilized [...]

Background: Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding and lack of hospital bed capacity are pervasive problems made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic. Bed capacity is a significant concern at Academic Medical Centers (AMCs), as patients depend upon AMCs for specialized in-hospital care not available at other regional hospitals. Bed capacity shortage is acutely felt at rural AMCs, [...]

Background: Traditional readmission case review processes at our tertiary-care academic institution failed to identify obvious target processes for readmission reduction.  Looking for a more nuanced method of readmission review, we turned to our patients.   We conducted over 300 readmitted patient interviews and a focus group to learn from our patient’s experiences.   We then developed a [...]

Background: Current staffing models cannot deliver the benefits of hospital medicine to the 1300 critical access hospitals (CAHs) located throughout the rural United States.   Staffing each CAH with local hospitalists would require at least 5500 hospitalists (more than 10% of the workforce), to cover less than 2% of the hospitalized population.   A “virtual hospitalist” program [...]

Background: Regionalization of a provider team’s patients within dedicated nursing units has been shown to allow for improved efficiency and interdisciplinary collaboration. However, the creation of full regionalization is not feasible or appropriate for many medical centers given resource limitations. We hypothesized that we could achieve a significant increase in patient regionalization by modifying admitting [...]

Background: Hospital medicine is the fastest growing subspecialty within internal medicine, growing from 10,000 hospitalists in 2002 to over 50,000 in 2016. Despite this growth, there remain relatively few hospitalists who are clinician investigators. We sought to quantify the number of clinician investigators, their dedicated time for research at major United States academic medical centers, [...]