Helping hospitalists achieve academic stature

✍ Scribed by Thomas McGinn

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 45 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1553-5592
• DOI: 10.1002/jhm.341

✦ Synopsis

A ccelerating the development of clinical research in academic hospitalist programs is a worthwhile goal if pursued with clarity, objectivity, and a thorough understanding of the process and its implications. In their articles, Flanders et al. 1 and Wright et al. 2 identify major barriers to growing academic hospitalist programs. These barriers include the need for protected time, the shortage of trained research faculty, the lack of infrastructure, and the limited availability of senior mentors. Both Flanders et al. and Wright et al. offer smart and innovative ways of addressing these issues. However, building an academic program from the ground up is more complex and challenging than it may seem at first glance. It takes time, patience, creativity, diplomacy, and the ability to recruit collaborators and advocates who are willing to share infrastructure and resources.

Although both articles add significantly to the discussion of strategies for creating an academic hospitalist program, they are unclear about the definition of academic in this context. The term academic is often misunderstood to be synonymous with research. However, research is just one component of an academic program, which also includes education, quality improvement (QI), administration, and program development. It may be helpful, therefore, to replace academic with scholarship, which can be defined as a process that involves peer review and dissemination of ideas at local, regional, and national levels. Scholarship also goes beyond research, encompassing education and other areas such as QI. Although academic programs are not necessarily involved with funded research, there is usually an expectation of peer review, through either presentations at regional and national meetings or publication. For the purposes of this discussion, the term academic hospitalist program will be defined broadly to include any program affiliated with a university that is involved in the teaching of residents and medical students and whose faculty is required to participate in a promotions process.

All members of an academic division should be expected to participate in scholarship, whether it is education, QI projects, or research. If there is a strong expectation that traditional National Institute of Health (NIH) funded research will take place, this expectation must come with sufficient resources. Without infrastructure for research and investment in research faculty, procuring NIH funds for research is not a reasonable expectation. Organizers of hospitalist programs currently within academic divisions of general internal medicine should consider ways to better integrate programs into the existing research infrastructure in their divisions. For either freestanding hospitalist programs or programs within academic divisions of general internal medicine, investments in infrastructure and faculty are