Despite high levels of research interest, hospitalists often participate at lower levels due to numerous barriers, including limited mentorship, difficulty balancing clinical work and research, and insufficient funding.1,2 To discuss these barriers and solutions to overcome them, the Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM) Research Special Interest Group (SIG) organized a virtual roundtable titled “From First Steps to Legacy: Building a Hospitalist Research Career.”3,4 We invited four established hospitalist-researchers with more than 22,000 combined citations: Peter Lindenauer, MD, MSc, from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School—Baystate in Springfield, Mass.; Valerie Press, MD, MPH, from the University of Chicago in Chicago; Matthew Pappas, MD, MPH, from the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland; and Sagar Dugani, MD, PhD, MPH, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The roundtable was a wide-ranging discussion on getting started in research, mentorship, funding, maintaining momentum, and integrating clinical and research time. Their advice converged on common themes: success comes from finding problems worth solving, cultivating professional relationships, aligning clinical practice and research, and anchoring work to a larger purpose.
Getting Started: Find Stones in Your Shoe
Choosing a research topic can be challenging for hospitalists. The panelists agreed that they often find projects by focusing on issues that bother them about current clinical practice. Dr. Pappas draws inspiration for his research from “stones in [his] shoe that annoy [him]…where medicine is not serving our patients as well as it could be,” which led him to study when to restart warfarin or apixaban after an upper gastrointestinal bleed.5 To then take that inspiration and turn it into an actionable research question, Dr. Press recommends becoming a “micro-expert” to identify gaps in the literature. But a compelling question is only the beginning; the right team determines whether it moves forward.
Mentorship: Build a Team
Mentorship is a significant barrier to hospitalist research, with only 19% of hospitalists having access to research mentors.6 Each panelist had a story about how working in teams helped their career. Dr. Press recommends finding “someone who can help you with a goal, whether it’s a partner, whether it’s someone senior to you that has methods or content expertise; you can’t do anything alone.” Dr. Dugani reiterates that “you need a team of mentors and a team of people to help you.” Mentorship does not need to be a classic mentor-mentee dyad; alternative models, such as peer mentorship or research coaching, can be equally effective.7
Mentorship also need not be exclusive to your institution. Dr. Lindenauer remarks that SHM fostered collegiality, especially in the field’s early days, when his home institution had limited opportunities. Building on this legacy, the Research SIG offers opportunities to collaborate and grow scholarship. Offerings include the Hospital Medicine National Writing Challenge, abstract and poster design webinars, and an interactive Research SIG forum at SHM Converge, where members brainstorm ideas, refine projects, and network with peers. Distilling the need for teams in research, Dr. Dugani recommends, “Build a team, ask for help, and don’t suffer alone.” However, even with the right mentorship team in place, competing demands can limit the available time for research.
Work-Life Balance: Align as Much as Possible
Balancing clinical and teaching commitments with research remains a struggle for most hospitalists. To navigate the competing demands, Dr. Press advises hospitalists to “align as much as possible.” For example, Dr. Press built synergy between her clinical work in a transitional care clinic and her research on care transitions. Similarly, early in his career, Dr. Lindenauer leveraged data from his quality-improvement initiatives to generate research questions about hospitalized patients. These examples illustrate that clinical care, teaching, and research do not need to exist in silos. However, even with alignment, protected time is often needed to further research, and funding is often the best way to obtain it.
Funding: Start Local
Lack of funding is a barrier to hospital medicine research: only 11% of hospitalists receive funding.8 While most hospitalists think of funding in terms of extramural funding through the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Press recommends starting locally, such as with local internal grant mechanisms or foundations, and not to “hesitate to work with people who have established funding.” State funding and funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality were also discussed as options. Additionally, aligning with institutional priorities can be helpful, as Dr. Pappas recommends that hospitalists “look for overlap between the institution’s goals and [your] own,” which could also open up internal funding opportunities. Yet even with funding secured, another barrier remains: sustaining momentum.
Motivation: How Will Medicine Be Better if You Complete This Project?
As most hospitalists do not have protected time for research, most scholarly work, including research, is completed during personal time.8 Therefore, internal motivation is often needed to drive a research project to completion. Our panelists offered a layered approach to maintaining motivation through the highs and lows of conducting research.
First, the research question should be genuinely interesting and a problem; as Dr. Dugani emphasizes, you should “[care] about the problem at three o’clock in the morning.” Next, the research project should feed your overall career goals. Dr. Lindenauer recommends “stepping back [and] envisioning where you want to be in five to 10 years and work backwards.” This career planning aligns interim challenges with your overarching goal. Dr. Press agreed that it is helpful “to [have] a goal to work towards because it’s easy to get caught up in life.” Finally, legacy is also a powerful motivator. Dr. Pappas is guided by the question, “How will medicine be better if you complete this project?” This multi-level advice can help sustain a research project through most obstacles to completion.
As our panelists illustrated, research careers are built intentionally, not accidentally. There is clearly a desire among hospitalists to conduct research, but how to do so remains daunting. As our panelists discussed, the barriers are real but navigable. Research begins with noticing “stones in your shoe” that arise in daily practice and show up much earlier than in the literature. Hospital medicine is a team sport, and research advances in similar ways through teams and mentorship. Research endures through purpose, either tied to long-term goals, stubborn problems, or commitment to make medicine better. Ultimately, research is not reserved for those with protected time, but for those willing to notice problems, build partnerships, and persist with intention.
Dr. Roseman
Ms. Hall
Dr. Keniston
Dr. Khaliq
Dr. Jamal
Dr. Olsen
Dr. Ward
Dr. Fatima
Dr. Roseman is a med-peds academic hospitalist, assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at UMass Chan Medical School–Baystate in Springfield, Mass., and a member of The Hospitalist’s editorial board. Ms. Hall is the senior medical writer at the Emory University School of Medicine’s division of hospital medicine in Atlanta. Dr. Keniston is the director of data and analytics for the division of hospital medicine and an associate professor at the University of Colorado in Anschutz, Colo. Dr. Khaliq is an associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the research elective and Summer Hospitalist Academic Research Program (SHARP) in the division of hospital medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, both in Baltimore, and serves as vice chair of SHM’s Research SIG. Dr. Jamal is a physician with over a decade of experience across clinical medicine, public health, and the life sciences, engaged in global clinical research in oncology with scholarly interests in care coordination, digital health–enabled care models, health systems innovation, and improving outcomes in complex and high-risk patient populations. Dr. Olsen is a postdoctoral research fellow and incoming hospitalist at the University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City. Dr. Ward is an academic hospitalist at Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Md. Dr. Fatima is an assistant professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and a hospitalist at Grady Memorial Hospital, both in Atlanta. SHM’s Research Special Interest Group periodically contributes articles supporting hospitalists in building and advancing their research careers.
References
- Dugani SB, et al. Perception of barriers to research among internal medicine physician hospitalists by career stage. Hosp Pract (1995). 2020;48(4):206-212. doi:10.1080/21548331.2020.1779537.
- Pappas MA, et al. State of research in adult hospital medicine: updated results of a national survey and longitudinal analysis of national data. J Hosp Med. 2023;18(6):519-523. doi:10.1002/jhm.13096.
- Quinn R. SIG spotlight: research. The Hospitalist website. https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/38956/sigs/sig-spotlight-research/. Published May 1, 2025. Accessed April 23, 2026.
- Research SIG. HMX by SHM. https://connect.hospitalmedicine.org/SIGs/research. Accessed February 27, 2026.
- Pappas MA, et al. Resuming anticoagulation following upper gastrointestinal bleeding among patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation-a microsimulation analysis. J Hosp Med. 2019;14(7):394-400. doi:10.12788/jhm.3189.
- Dang Do AN, et al. Research and publication trends in hospital medicine. J Hosp Med. 2014;9(3):148-154. doi:10.1002/jhm.2148.
- Rohatgi N, et al. Research mentorship models in hospital medicine: A narrative review. Br J Hosp Med (Lond). 2025;86(11):1-18. doi:10.12968/hmed.2025.0089.
- Elias R, et al. Protected time for research among academic hospitalists: a qualitative study of hospitalist group leaders. J Gen Intern Med. 2024;39(5):723-730. doi:10.1007/s11606-023-08525-5.