Q: What do you dislike most?

A: Poorly managed end-of-life care. I am a strong proponent of proper utilization of palliative care to maximize quality of life and minimize suffering, both for the patient and family members.

Q: What’s the best advice you ever received?

A: Focus and respond with thoughtfulness and empathy. Do not react with emotion.

Q: Did you have a mentor during training or early career? If so, who was the mentor, and what were the most important lessons you learned from him/her?

A: I had a biochemistry instructor in undergrad who was an all-around high quality individual. I had a great deal of respect for how he treated and interacted with others. I have always tried to emulate it.

Q: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in HM in your career?

A: I started in the infancy of the field, so everything has changed. Acceptance and understanding of a team-based inpatient approach is possibly one of the biggest.

Q: What’s the biggest change you would like to see in HM?

A: Further understanding and promotion of the benefits of focused management of the inpatient population, as well as the benefits of more intensive transitional care after hospitalization.

Q: Why is it important for you, as a hospitalist group leader, to continue seeing patients?

A: To stay in touch with what patients experience.

Q: What aspect of patient care is most rewarding?

A: An acutely ill patient who responds well to medical intervention and within hours to days is feeling dramatically better.

Q: What aspect of teaching medicine in the 21st century is most difficult? And what is most enjoyable?

A: Most difficult is managing the time to teach around other duties of the day. Most rewarding is teaching the concept of not just medicine, but team organization and leadership within the hospital setting.

Q: What is your biggest professional reward?

A: Having built a large hospital medicine system, along with the camaraderie and respect for the people who I worked with to do it.

Q: What SHM event or meeting has made the most lasting impression on you?

A: I always feel that the annual Society of Hospital Medicine meeting has an amazing wealth of knowledge and experience to gain from.

Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

A: Hopefully, working with quality outcomes and patient experience on a large scale.

Q: If you weren’t a doctor, what would you be doing right now?

A: Likely something in the area of biochemistry/genetics.

Q: When you aren’t working, what is important to you?

A: Family, friends, music, travel.

Q: PC or tablet?

A: Tablet.

Q: What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

A: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It’s very deep and insightful in how we react to situations and make decisions. There are factors that have major effects on decisions that we can be completely unaware of unless we are cognizant of them. It significantly changed my approach to many situations and also applies well to the decision-making process in medicine.

Q: Apple or Android?

A: Apple.