Community Service
Burke Kealey, MD, FHM, knows exactly what he brings to the SHM board table. With more than a decade of experience as a practicing hospitalist and directing the HM service he co-founded in 1997, Dr. Kealey says he will champion the community hospitalist cause during his three-year term on the 12-seat board.
“I want to be a voice for community hospitalists, both in urban and rural settings,” says Dr. Kealey, who as medical director of hospital medicine at Health Partners Medical Group in Minneapolis oversees 65 hospitalists at five hospitals in the Twin Cities and two rural hospitals in western Wisconsin.
An active SHM member since the beginning, Dr. Kealey is a familiar face in society circles. He’s a facilitator for SHM’s Leadership Academy and practice management faculty for the One-Day Hospitalist University. He’s served as chair of SHM’s Practice Analysis Committee the past three years, and he is a staunch supporter of society efforts to nurture HM leaders through education, mentorship, and guidance.
As chair of the Practice Analysis Committee, Dr. Kealey has firsthand knowledge of SHM’s efforts to collect, analyze, and distribute compensation and productivity benchmarks to the specialty. The biannual survey data is critical to negotiations between community hospitals and hospital administration, especially in these choppy economic waters.
“We need to make sure we are getting good data and we must tell the story better,” Dr. Kealey says. “Rural hospitalists are growing, and they are hungry for information to compare their practice to others across the nation.”
Just as he does in his own practice, Dr. Kealey wants SHM to promote an atmosphere of inclusivity. “We cannot do our daily job without the nursing staff [administrative staff, therapy, etc.],” he says. “We’re not a one-man show.”