QUOTABLE: “I believe the advent of hospitalist medicine is the single most important innovation I have seen in 40 years of patient care. Of the many rewards it has brought me, helping to assemble highly functioning hospitalist teams is the greatest. As a member of The Hospitalist’s editorial board, I hope to advance the cause of hospitalist medicine, in general, and especially as a way of benefitting small outlying hospitals and the patients they serve.”
Amanda T. Trask, MBA, MHA, SFHM
Trask is vice president for the national hospital medicine service line at Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), a nonprofit, faith-based system operating in 19 states. Trask focuses on improving clinical and business outcomes through enhancing collaboration, improving processes, and optimizing current practices of hospitalist providers practicing in CHI hospitals. She earned her degrees at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she was awarded the Public Health Service DHHS Traineeship Grant and several academic scholarships.
QUOTABLE: “Hospitalists have the opportunity to transform the delivery of acute care and beyond, as population health care models continue to advance. Being an administrative hospitalist leader allows me to be influential and involved in this transformation.
David Weidig, MD
Dr. Weidig is system director of hospital medicine for Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin. In 2007, he started the Aurora Hospital Medicine System with one program and six physicians; it has grown to 13 programs and over 150 FTEs. He is responsible for the co-development of the unit-based, RN-physician collaborative care model, recognized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a top intra-collaborative care model. Dr. Weidig completed his medical degree at Northwestern University in Chicago and his internal medicine residency at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego. He served as president of SHM’s Pacific Northwest Chapter from 2005 to 2007 and is a member of the Multi-Site Hospitalist Leader Task Force.
QUOTABLE: “HM focuses on care delivery process improvement that has a dramatic effect both in efficiency and quality of outcomes. These improvements are reaching a scale that may be unprecedented in the history of U.S. healthcare. As a member of The Hospitalist’s editorial board, I hope to share ideas and work with others to further develop these care delivery models and enhance their effect.”
Robert Zipper, MD, MMM, SFHM
Dr. Zipper is a regional chief medical officer at Tacoma, Wash.-based Sound Physicians, where he provides operational oversight of Sound’s hospitalist, LTACH, post acute, and transitional care programs. He earned his master’s degree in medical management at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and his doctorate of medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit. He completed his internal medicine residency at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. An active SHM member, he has served as chairman of the SHM Leadership Committee.
QUOTABLE: “My choice [to become a hospitalist] was more practical than anything else. I knew that I liked inpatient medicine, and I could not keep doing both inpatient and outpatient in the manner I was. I was forced to choose, and within a week of starting a focus on only hospital medicine, I knew it was the right one.”