Challenges and Opportunities in Academic Hospital Medicine: Report from the Academic Hospital Medicine Summit

BACKGROUND: The field of hospital medicine is growing rapidly in academic medical centers. However, few organizations have explicitly considered the opportunities and barriers posed to hospital medicine’s development as an academic field in internal medicine. OBJECTIVE: To develop consensus around key areas limiting or facilitating hospital medicine’s development as an academic discipline. DESIGN: Consensus format conference of key stakeholders in academic hospital medicine. RESULTS: The Consensus Group identified several issues impeding the development of academic hospital medicine as a recognized entity in academic settings, including extraordinarily rapid growth, increasingly preponderate non-teaching roles, and demands to perform non-clinical duties (such as quality improvement) not generally viewed as academic pursuits. The Consensus Group developed recommendations for addressing these concerns, specifically 1) characterizing the ‘optimal’ job description for an academic hospitalist, 2) developing better local and at-a-distance opportunities for training academic hospitalists in key aspects of early career success, 3) advocacy for development of fellows and junior faculty researchers in hospital medicine. SUMMARY: Fostering academic hospital medicine will help address these issues more effectively and will help the field while also attracting the next generation of generalists needed to care for an increasingly complex inpatient population.