By: Emily Gottenborg, MD and Ashley Duckett, MD
As fall arrives, new interns are rapidly gaining clinical confidence, and residency recruitment season is ramping up. It’s also time to announce the opening of the SHM Student Hospitalist Scholar Grant Program applications; we are now recruiting our sixth group of scholars for the summer and longitudinal programs. Since its creation in 2015, the grant has supported 23 students in this incredible opportunity to allow trainees to engage in scholarly work with guidance from a mentor to better understand the practice of hospital medicine and to further grow our robust pipeline.
The 2018-2019 cohort of scholars, Matthew Fallon, Philip Huang and Erin Rainosek, just concluded their projects and are currently preparing their abstracts for submission for Hospital Medicine 2020, where there is a track for Early-Career Hospitalists. The projects targeted a diverse set of domains, including improving upon the patient experience, readmission quality metrics, geographic cohorting and clinical documentation integrity – all highly relevant topics for a practicing hospitalist.
Matthew Fallon collaborated with his mentor, Dr. Venkata Andukuri, at Creighton University, to reduce the rate of hospital readmission for patients with heart failure, by analyzing retrospective data in a root cause analysis to identify factors that influence readmission rate, then targeting those directly. They also integrated the patient experience by seeking out patient input as to the challenges they face in the management of their heart failure.
Philip Huang worked with his mentor, Dr. Ethan Kuperman, at the Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa, to improve geographic localization for hospitalized patients to improve care efficiency. They worked closely with an industrial engineering team to create a workflow model integrated into the hospital EHR to designate patient location and were able to better understand the role that other professions play in improving the healthcare delivery.
Erin Rainosek teamed up with her mentor, Dr. Luci Leykum, at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, to apply a design thinking strategy to redesign the healthcare experience for hospitalized patients. She engaged in over 120 hours of patient interviews and ultimately identified key themes that impact the experience of care, which will serve as target areas moving forward.
Finally, Yasaswi Vengalasetti had the opportunity to travel from University of Central Florida where he attends, to Stanford University to collaborate with his mentor, Dr. Lisa Shieh, to improve clinical documentation integrity for patients with malnutrition, with the goal of performing more accurate nutritional assessments, identifying those patients at higher risk of mortality, and ultimately improving the reimbursement rates for malnourished, hospitalized patients.
The student scholars in this cohort gained significant insight into the patient experience and quality issues relevant to the field of hospital medicine. We are proud of their accomplishments and look forward to their future successes and careers in hospital medicine. If you would like to learn more about the experience of our scholars this past summer, they have posted full write-ups on the Future Hospitalist RoundUp blog in HMX, SHM’s online community.
For students interested in becoming scholars, SHM offers two options to eligible medical students – the Summer Program and the Longitudinal Program. Both programs allow students to participate in projects related to quality improvement, patient safety, clinical research or hospital operations, in order to learn more about career paths in hospital medicine. Students will have the opportunity to conduct scholarly work with a mentor in these domains, with the option of participating over the summer during a 6-10-week period or longitudinally throughout the course of a year.
Discover additional benefits and how to apply on the SHM website. Applications will close in late January 2020.
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