Early-career Academic Hospitalist Speed-mentoring Session

Tuesday, May 2, 2017, Noon – 1:00 p.m.

Chairs: Joanna M. Bonsall, MD, PhD; Kelly Cunningham Sponsler, MD, FHM.

Early-career academic hospitalists who enroll in this activity will receive personalized mentorship from up to three senior faculty members during this special session. The first 20 participants will be accepted.

Although there is no additional fee, preregistration is required:

Due to the individualized match process, it will not be possible to register for this activity on-site.

Academic and Research Special Interest Forum

Tuesday, May 2, 2017, 4:30 – 5:25 p.m.
Joanna Bonsall, Gregory Seymann, Vikas Parekh, Luci Leykum

SHM’s Academic and Research Committees will facilitate collaborative discussions on research and quality improvement projects throughout the Academic Hospital Medicine Community. The forum will highlight projects that are seeking collaborators. Participants will have the opportunity to meet fellow hospitalists who share similar interests in scholarly inquiry and make connections that will help foster mutually beneficial work.

This forum is targeted to academic or community hospitalists who:

• Have a local QI or research project that would benefit from expanding its scope to other sites
• Are seeking assistance in expanding their network to facilitate scholarly collaboration
• Are interested in joining an established project

If you have a project, please complete and return the project form to Cynthia McConnell as soon as possible. Each investigator will spend 1-2 minutes briefly “pitching” the project to the group, followed by small group breakout discussions with attendees interested in collaborating.

Academic events at a major hospital medicine meeting create a dedicated forum where clinicians, researchers, and educators can converge around shared scholarly interests. These sessions are designed to surface emerging questions in patient care, quality improvement, and clinical innovation, giving participants a structured opportunity to move beyond routine practice and engage with new ideas. By gathering colleagues from diverse institutions in one setting, the program fosters the kind of cross-site dialogue that individual workplaces rarely allow, helping attendees broaden their perspectives on how hospital medicine is evolving across the country.

One of the most valuable components of academic programming is the opportunity to expand projects beyond a single institution. Many quality improvement and research initiatives begin locally, but their impact grows when collaborators from other hospitals contribute data, refine methodologies, or test interventions in different patient populations. Networking sessions built into the meeting agenda help investigators identify partners with relevant expertise, whether in study design, data analysis, or implementation science. This kind of multi-site collaboration strengthens the generalizability of findings and accelerates the translation of evidence into everyday bedside practice.

Brief project pitches have become a popular format at these gatherings, allowing investigators to share concise overviews of work in progress or proposals seeking collaboration. Each presenter typically has only a few minutes to communicate the purpose of the project, its current status, and the type of partnership being sought. Attendees can then self-select into small breakout discussions with the investigators whose work aligns with their own interests. This efficient structure respects everyone's time while maximizing the potential for meaningful follow-up conversations after the meeting concludes.

Joining an established project is often an accessible entry point for clinicians new to scholarly work. Rather than designing a study from scratch, early-career hospitalists and curious practitioners can contribute to ongoing efforts, learning research methods and publication processes through hands-on involvement. Established investigators, in turn, benefit from fresh perspectives and additional capacity at participating sites. The collaborative model recognizes that hospital medicine is fundamentally a team discipline, and that the most durable advances in patient care tend to emerge when colleagues across institutions build on one another's work.

The broader annual meeting reinforces these academic activities by surrounding them with complementary educational formats. Pre-courses, scientific abstract presentations, and special forums provide context for the collaboration sessions, helping attendees understand where current evidence stands and where gaps remain. Together, these offerings transform the gathering from a passive learning experience into an active workspace, where hospitalists can simultaneously absorb new knowledge, refine their own thinking, and forge the professional relationships that sustain long-term scholarly work well after the meeting has ended.