Society of Hospital Medicine’s Annual Meeting Heads to Las Vegas
Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
HM14 is expected to be the largest annual meeting yet, with nearly 3,000 projected attendees. The four-day meeting, March 24-27, has three new continuing medical courses (see “Debut,” on p. 16), a new “Bending the Cost Curve” track, and a panel discussion of Obamacare populated by four national thought leaders.
The meeting also serves up a bevy of perennial favorites: breakout sessions, practice management strategies, awards ceremonies, special interest forums, the popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignette (RIV) poster competition, and a trio of keynote addresses.
For HM14 course director Daniel Brotman, MD, FACP, SFHM, and assistant course director Efren Manjarrez, MD, SFHM, crafting the convention is as much about taking a step back as it is about immersing oneself in the specialty.
“To really be able to take a step back and think about how we fit into that big picture may make you feel small and insignificant in the same way that thinking about the cosmos might,” says Dr. Brotman, director of the hospitalist program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. “But it certainly makes me feel like I’m part of a bigger goal and a grand vision for where we need to go as a medical society, as a field, and as practitioners in a world that needs change.”
–Dr. Brotman, director of the hospitalist program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
SHM President Eric Howell, MD, SFHM, chief of hospital medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, couldn’t agree more.
“Like many physicians, we’re busy doing our job day in and day out,” he says. “We lose [sight of] the fact that we’re privileged and lucky to be in a specialty that’s growing and makes the world a better place.”
For Darren Swenson, MD, a regional medical advisor for IPC The Hospitalist Co. in Las Vegas, who founded SHM’s society chapter there about a decade ago, the meeting is a chance to view his specialty from the proverbial 30,000 feet and to get policy updates and clinical information while reconnecting with old friends and colleagues. In recent years, he has had to choose between SHM’s annual event and the yearly meeting of the American College of Physician Executives.
This year, he’s doing both. And Dr. Swenson notes that the allure of SHM’s convention is not just the detail of each of its offerings. It’s all of them.
“It’s essential, because what you’re getting is those thought leaders, as well as the academics, as well as real life business education—all in one area,” Dr. Swenson says. “And when you’re able to choose your tracks to identify those programs that are of interest to you at that point in your career, it makes it very attractive.”
Richard Quinn is a freelance writer in New Jersey.