Look, anything good enough for the iconic character of Crash Davis in the movie Bull Durham is good enough for hospital medicine. At least, so says the attendance of the Durham Bulls social event that the SHM North Carolina Triangle Chapter organizes every year. The group sets up a dinner at a restaurant whose grounds overlook the minor-league baseball stadium of the Durham Bulls.
Dr. Piazza
“There’s no formal academic agenda—it’s simply an opportunity to build relationships and strengthen our professional community. People really enjoy the baseball game and the camaraderie,” says chapter President Nicholas Piazza, MD, FACP, FHM, an associate professor of hospital medicine at UNC School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, N.C.
That’s because the group’s members really enjoy the chapter. Don’t take Dr. Piazza’s word for it.
Nine chapter members have been SHM members for more than 20 years. One dates back to 1998, just a few years after the term hospitalist was coined. Chapter members who renewed last year had been around for eight-plus years.
Several took part in the most recent SHM Hill Day, where policy wonks and hospitalists converged to lobby members of Congress about what matters most to hospitalists and their patients. In addition, the chapter’s Converge meet-and-greet facilitated professional connections on a national level.
For the Triangle chapter, the year’s biggest annual event is almost certainly its Research, Innovations and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) Poster Competition, which Dr. Piazza values both as a marketing tool and as “a vital platform for mentorship, networking, and scholarly achievement.”
“It’s stiff competition every year, and we really go through an extensive peer review process for every abstract that comes through,” he said. “We have multiple reviewers who read the abstracts and score them based on originality and relevance to hospital medicine, and the best-scoring abstracts are invited to present. It’s been an exciting thing to be a part of over the past few years. Our RIV competition is consistently a high-value event for our members because it serves as an opportunity to get research out there and … help with their academic promotion.”
Dr. Piazza says the competition has grown strongly over the past five years. “When I first started as a member, there were a handful of posters. Our 2024 event featured 53 highly polished abstracts. It’s great because it seems like the popularity is growing. Especially with the residents and the medical students, in addition to the hospitalists, who really enjoy participating. People look forward to it every year.”
Dr. Piazza and the entire triangle leadership team have tried to steer chapter activities and resources to the needs of their local hospitalist community.
“We’re in a very highly academic area, as you know: we have Duke [University] and UNC here,” Dr. Piazza said. “A lot of other chapters out there, further removed from academic centers, serve a vital role of providing regular continuing medical education for members. In our chapter, members get a lot of that education through their day-to-day work with grand rounds and other didactics. We’ve tried to focus more of our efforts on providing a venue for people to present their research and highlighting professional achievement.”
Perhaps the chapter’s second-most popular event was last year’s inaugural awards night. “We built it around the chapter excellence and exemplary awards they do at Converge every year,” Dr. Piazza said. “We give out awards for our local members for academic excellence, and excellence in humanitarian work if people are out doing stuff that is above and beyond their normal call of duty as hospitalists.”
“I think a lot of times hospitalists, our administrative staff, and our students and residents, do a lot of good work that doesn’t always get recognized. We saw our local SHM chapter as a way to be able to recognize some of that work and give people the opportunity to nominate their peers and use those awards for career growth and CV building. People seem to have responded really well to it.”
To Dr. Piazza, it’s another example of listening to members and using chapter resources to meet the needs of the community. And it’s not just him. He also credits his leadership team, including president-elect Dr. Amy Tierney, and other volunteers like Drs. Aaron Fried, Patrick O’Shea, Jewook Ha, Ruchi Doshi, and Jay Kachoria.
“Every chapter is different,” he said. “I think leadership committees in the chapters just need to be aware of what their chapter body is made up of. The vast majority of our members are connected somehow to a teaching hospital … we try to do stuff that attracts everybody, but it seems like the appetite has been more around the poster competition, the awards night, and also just like social outings to have networking and meet the other hospitalists in the area.”
Richard Quinn is a freelance writer in New Jersey.