Brendon Shank

Education and training always will be a major draw for hospitalists attending SHM’s annual meetings, but hospitalists who let their day end after the last educational session are missing some of the meeting’s biggest opportunities for professional growth, according to conference veterans.

Networking, whether in between sessions, on the exhibit floor, at receptions, or after hours, can be a powerful career development tool, according to Jeff Glasheen, MD, SFHM, HM12 course director, and Michael Pistoria, DO, FACP, SFHM, course director for HM13.

“Hospitalists who haven’t attended an SHM annual meeting before are going to be pleasantly surprised by the accessibility and friendliness of faculty and other leaders in the field,” Dr. Pistoria says. “Networking opportunities will be everywhere at HM12. Smart hospitalists will take advantage of them to make connections, find resources, and advance their careers.”

Dr. Pistoria also points to SHM’s special-interest groups as easy ways to quickly find hospitalists with similar interests and establish professional networks.

The impact of networking at the annual meeting extends beyond individual interests, Dr. Glasheen says. Savvy networkers can impact the entire specialty, but they need to show up.

“This is our chance to influence the society—both big ‘S’ and small ‘s.’ And you can’t do that on your couch at home,” he says. “If you care about your field, be at the meeting learning with others, meeting colleagues, and influencing the direction of the field. This field is still new enough, small enough, and undifferentiated enough that you can influence its direction. Your odds of doing that are enhanced with the more people you meet.”

Staying true to the “connect” and “collaborate” themes, HM12 will provide unprecedented opportunities to network with other hospitalists from across the country, including new breaks, receptions, and the special-interest groups.

As in years past, the most resourceful hospitalists will find even more informal opportunities, such as time between sessions and unwinding after a full day of meetings. Dr. Pistoria says the after-hours sessions pay off in the form of a support structure that he can rely on for professional advice.

“I remember the relationships that are developed and nurtured during time networking,” he says. “Those same relationships then help me when I am faced with an issue at my institution. I’ve now got built-in ‘consultants’—friends at other institutions that I can email and ask, ‘What are you doing about …’”

He also finds the networking personally rewarding, bridging the gap from professional colleagues to personal friends. “Those hours are where I’ve developed the friendships that I have with other SHM members,” he says.

Brendon Shank is associate vice president of communications for SHM.

Education and training always will be a major draw for hospitalists attending SHM’s annual meetings, but hospitalists who let their day end after the last educational session are missing some of the meeting’s biggest opportunities for professional growth, according to conference veterans.

Networking, whether in between sessions, on the exhibit floor, at receptions, or after hours, can be a powerful career development tool, according to Jeff Glasheen, MD, SFHM, HM12 course director, and Michael Pistoria, DO, FACP, SFHM, course director for HM13.

“Hospitalists who haven’t attended an SHM annual meeting before are going to be pleasantly surprised by the accessibility and friendliness of faculty and other leaders in the field,” Dr. Pistoria says. “Networking opportunities will be everywhere at HM12. Smart hospitalists will take advantage of them to make connections, find resources, and advance their careers.”

Dr. Pistoria also points to SHM’s special-interest groups as easy ways to quickly find hospitalists with similar interests and establish professional networks.

The impact of networking at the annual meeting extends beyond individual interests, Dr. Glasheen says. Savvy networkers can impact the entire specialty, but they need to show up.

“This is our chance to influence the society—both big ‘S’ and small ‘s.’ And you can’t do that on your couch at home,” he says. “If you care about your field, be at the meeting learning with others, meeting colleagues, and influencing the direction of the field. This field is still new enough, small enough, and undifferentiated enough that you can influence its direction. Your odds of doing that are enhanced with the more people you meet.”

Staying true to the “connect” and “collaborate” themes, HM12 will provide unprecedented opportunities to network with other hospitalists from across the country, including new breaks, receptions, and the special-interest groups.

As in years past, the most resourceful hospitalists will find even more informal opportunities, such as time between sessions and unwinding after a full day of meetings. Dr. Pistoria says the after-hours sessions pay off in the form of a support structure that he can rely on for professional advice.

“I remember the relationships that are developed and nurtured during time networking,” he says. “Those same relationships then help me when I am faced with an issue at my institution. I’ve now got built-in ‘consultants’—friends at other institutions that I can email and ask, ‘What are you doing about …’”

He also finds the networking personally rewarding, bridging the gap from professional colleagues to personal friends. “Those hours are where I’ve developed the friendships that I have with other SHM members,” he says.

Brendon Shank is associate vice president of communications for SHM.

Education and training always will be a major draw for hospitalists attending SHM’s annual meetings, but hospitalists who let their day end after the last educational session are missing some of the meeting’s biggest opportunities for professional growth, according to conference veterans.

Networking, whether in between sessions, on the exhibit floor, at receptions, or after hours, can be a powerful career development tool, according to Jeff Glasheen, MD, SFHM, HM12 course director, and Michael Pistoria, DO, FACP, SFHM, course director for HM13.

“Hospitalists who haven’t attended an SHM annual meeting before are going to be pleasantly surprised by the accessibility and friendliness of faculty and other leaders in the field,” Dr. Pistoria says. “Networking opportunities will be everywhere at HM12. Smart hospitalists will take advantage of them to make connections, find resources, and advance their careers.”

Dr. Pistoria also points to SHM’s special-interest groups as easy ways to quickly find hospitalists with similar interests and establish professional networks.

The impact of networking at the annual meeting extends beyond individual interests, Dr. Glasheen says. Savvy networkers can impact the entire specialty, but they need to show up.

“This is our chance to influence the society—both big ‘S’ and small ‘s.’ And you can’t do that on your couch at home,” he says. “If you care about your field, be at the meeting learning with others, meeting colleagues, and influencing the direction of the field. This field is still new enough, small enough, and undifferentiated enough that you can influence its direction. Your odds of doing that are enhanced with the more people you meet.”

Staying true to the “connect” and “collaborate” themes, HM12 will provide unprecedented opportunities to network with other hospitalists from across the country, including new breaks, receptions, and the special-interest groups.

As in years past, the most resourceful hospitalists will find even more informal opportunities, such as time between sessions and unwinding after a full day of meetings. Dr. Pistoria says the after-hours sessions pay off in the form of a support structure that he can rely on for professional advice.

“I remember the relationships that are developed and nurtured during time networking,” he says. “Those same relationships then help me when I am faced with an issue at my institution. I’ve now got built-in ‘consultants’—friends at other institutions that I can email and ask, ‘What are you doing about …’”

He also finds the networking personally rewarding, bridging the gap from professional colleagues to personal friends. “Those hours are where I’ve developed the friendships that I have with other SHM members,” he says.

Brendon Shank is associate vice president of communications for SHM.

Dr. Iannini

New Bedford, Mass.-based Southcoast Hospitals Group has announced the appointment of Paul B. Iannini, MD, as physician-in-chief for medicine. Dr. Iannini will directly oversee inpatient medical services, including the hospitalist, intensivist, infectious disease, gastroenterology, endocrinology, and neurology programs. He will work with the medical staff to establish measurements that will facilitate ongoing improvements in the quality of care, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of care across all three Southcoast Hospitals sites—Charlton Memorial in Fall River, St. Luke’s in New Bedford, and Tobey in Wareham.

Dr. Iannini was formerly vice president for medical services at WellSpan Health in Pennsylvania, with responsibility for 17 hospital-based departments across two hospitals and nine specialty physician practices

Dr. Handin

David Handin, MD, has been named director of the HM program at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Mass.

Dr. Handin has been a full-time hospitalist at Emerson for the past seven years. He began his career in Arizona, where he served for two years in the Indian Health Service on the Navajo reservation and then worked for two more years in a medical practice in Bisbee, Ariz. He returned to Massachusetts in 2000 as an attending physician on the hospitalist service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Dr. Bowmen

David Bowman, MD, executive director of IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc.’s Tucson, Ariz., division, has received the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) and American College of Medical Practice Executives (ACMPE) Physician Executive of the Year award for 2011. The award recognizes a physician executive in a medical group practice who has exhibited outstanding leadership to achieve exceptional performance in the delivery of healthcare in his or her practice and community through personal example and collaborative team management.

Dr. Gorman

Mary Jo Gorman, MD, MBA, MHM, chief executive officer and founder of Advanced ICU Care and former president of SHM, has been named a winner of the 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneurial Winning Women competition. The annual competition and leadership program honors female founders or co-founders of businesses whose success demonstrates the creativity, tenacity, and conviction necessary to realize their companies’ full potential and the drive to achieve market leadership.

One of 10 honorees, Dr. Gorman practiced as both an intensivist and a hospitalist physician before founding Advanced ICU Care in 2004. The company combines the technology of telemedicine with the clinical expertise of experienced intensivists and critical-care nurses to provide around-the-clock intensivist coverage.

Dr. Iannini

New Bedford, Mass.-based Southcoast Hospitals Group has announced the appointment of Paul B. Iannini, MD, as physician-in-chief for medicine. Dr. Iannini will directly oversee inpatient medical services, including the hospitalist, intensivist, infectious disease, gastroenterology, endocrinology, and neurology programs. He will work with the medical staff to establish measurements that will facilitate ongoing improvements in the quality of care, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of care across all three Southcoast Hospitals sites—Charlton Memorial in Fall River, St. Luke’s in New Bedford, and Tobey in Wareham.

Dr. Iannini was formerly vice president for medical services at WellSpan Health in Pennsylvania, with responsibility for 17 hospital-based departments across two hospitals and nine specialty physician practices

Dr. Handin

David Handin, MD, has been named director of the HM program at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Mass.

Dr. Handin has been a full-time hospitalist at Emerson for the past seven years. He began his career in Arizona, where he served for two years in the Indian Health Service on the Navajo reservation and then worked for two more years in a medical practice in Bisbee, Ariz. He returned to Massachusetts in 2000 as an attending physician on the hospitalist service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Dr. Bowmen

David Bowman, MD, executive director of IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc.’s Tucson, Ariz., division, has received the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) and American College of Medical Practice Executives (ACMPE) Physician Executive of the Year award for 2011. The award recognizes a physician executive in a medical group practice who has exhibited outstanding leadership to achieve exceptional performance in the delivery of healthcare in his or her practice and community through personal example and collaborative team management.

Dr. Gorman

Mary Jo Gorman, MD, MBA, MHM, chief executive officer and founder of Advanced ICU Care and former president of SHM, has been named a winner of the 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneurial Winning Women competition. The annual competition and leadership program honors female founders or co-founders of businesses whose success demonstrates the creativity, tenacity, and conviction necessary to realize their companies’ full potential and the drive to achieve market leadership.

One of 10 honorees, Dr. Gorman practiced as both an intensivist and a hospitalist physician before founding Advanced ICU Care in 2004. The company combines the technology of telemedicine with the clinical expertise of experienced intensivists and critical-care nurses to provide around-the-clock intensivist coverage.

Dr. Iannini

New Bedford, Mass.-based Southcoast Hospitals Group has announced the appointment of Paul B. Iannini, MD, as physician-in-chief for medicine. Dr. Iannini will directly oversee inpatient medical services, including the hospitalist, intensivist, infectious disease, gastroenterology, endocrinology, and neurology programs. He will work with the medical staff to establish measurements that will facilitate ongoing improvements in the quality of care, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of care across all three Southcoast Hospitals sites—Charlton Memorial in Fall River, St. Luke’s in New Bedford, and Tobey in Wareham.

Dr. Iannini was formerly vice president for medical services at WellSpan Health in Pennsylvania, with responsibility for 17 hospital-based departments across two hospitals and nine specialty physician practices

Dr. Handin

David Handin, MD, has been named director of the HM program at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Mass.

Dr. Handin has been a full-time hospitalist at Emerson for the past seven years. He began his career in Arizona, where he served for two years in the Indian Health Service on the Navajo reservation and then worked for two more years in a medical practice in Bisbee, Ariz. He returned to Massachusetts in 2000 as an attending physician on the hospitalist service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Dr. Bowmen

David Bowman, MD, executive director of IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc.’s Tucson, Ariz., division, has received the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) and American College of Medical Practice Executives (ACMPE) Physician Executive of the Year award for 2011. The award recognizes a physician executive in a medical group practice who has exhibited outstanding leadership to achieve exceptional performance in the delivery of healthcare in his or her practice and community through personal example and collaborative team management.

Dr. Gorman

Mary Jo Gorman, MD, MBA, MHM, chief executive officer and founder of Advanced ICU Care and former president of SHM, has been named a winner of the 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneurial Winning Women competition. The annual competition and leadership program honors female founders or co-founders of businesses whose success demonstrates the creativity, tenacity, and conviction necessary to realize their companies’ full potential and the drive to achieve market leadership.

One of 10 honorees, Dr. Gorman practiced as both an intensivist and a hospitalist physician before founding Advanced ICU Care in 2004. The company combines the technology of telemedicine with the clinical expertise of experienced intensivists and critical-care nurses to provide around-the-clock intensivist coverage.

Knoxville, Tenn.-based TeamHealth Holdings Inc. has announced the acquisition of the operations of Integrity Hospitalists Group LLC (IHG). IHG has been providing hospital medicine services at University Medical Center in Lebanon, Tenn., for the past four years. Physicians affiliated with IHG provide the general medical care of hospitalized patients who do not have an assigned PCP, or whose PCP has chosen to transfer care during their patients’ inpatient stay. TeamHealth Hospital Medicine has begun providing services for this 24/7 HM program, which manages about 10,000 patient encounters a year. Alexander Badru, MD, and Anthony Efobi, MD, have been providing inpatient services for University Medical Center since April 2007, and will continue in their roles with TeamHealth.

IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc. has acquired five small practices in several of the company’s existing markets. The practices include: Lake Hospitalists Inc. in Leesburg, Fla.; the practice of Babar Sanaullah, MD, PLC, in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Comprehensive Wound Care Inc. in Phoenix, Ariz.; the practice of Ed Soumi, MD, PC, in Las Vegas; and the practice of Elliott I. Greenspan, DO, PC, in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. The five practices have a combined total of about 43,000 encounters a year.

IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc. also has announced a management transition as part of its chief financial officer succession plan. Richard H. Kline has joined IPC as CFO; the company’s longtime CFO, Devra G. Shapiro, will become its chief administrative officer.

Knoxville, Tenn.-based TeamHealth Holdings Inc. has announced the acquisition of the operations of Integrity Hospitalists Group LLC (IHG). IHG has been providing hospital medicine services at University Medical Center in Lebanon, Tenn., for the past four years. Physicians affiliated with IHG provide the general medical care of hospitalized patients who do not have an assigned PCP, or whose PCP has chosen to transfer care during their patients’ inpatient stay. TeamHealth Hospital Medicine has begun providing services for this 24/7 HM program, which manages about 10,000 patient encounters a year. Alexander Badru, MD, and Anthony Efobi, MD, have been providing inpatient services for University Medical Center since April 2007, and will continue in their roles with TeamHealth.

IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc. has acquired five small practices in several of the company’s existing markets. The practices include: Lake Hospitalists Inc. in Leesburg, Fla.; the practice of Babar Sanaullah, MD, PLC, in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Comprehensive Wound Care Inc. in Phoenix, Ariz.; the practice of Ed Soumi, MD, PC, in Las Vegas; and the practice of Elliott I. Greenspan, DO, PC, in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. The five practices have a combined total of about 43,000 encounters a year.

IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc. also has announced a management transition as part of its chief financial officer succession plan. Richard H. Kline has joined IPC as CFO; the company’s longtime CFO, Devra G. Shapiro, will become its chief administrative officer.

Knoxville, Tenn.-based TeamHealth Holdings Inc. has announced the acquisition of the operations of Integrity Hospitalists Group LLC (IHG). IHG has been providing hospital medicine services at University Medical Center in Lebanon, Tenn., for the past four years. Physicians affiliated with IHG provide the general medical care of hospitalized patients who do not have an assigned PCP, or whose PCP has chosen to transfer care during their patients’ inpatient stay. TeamHealth Hospital Medicine has begun providing services for this 24/7 HM program, which manages about 10,000 patient encounters a year. Alexander Badru, MD, and Anthony Efobi, MD, have been providing inpatient services for University Medical Center since April 2007, and will continue in their roles with TeamHealth.

IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc. has acquired five small practices in several of the company’s existing markets. The practices include: Lake Hospitalists Inc. in Leesburg, Fla.; the practice of Babar Sanaullah, MD, PLC, in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Comprehensive Wound Care Inc. in Phoenix, Ariz.; the practice of Ed Soumi, MD, PC, in Las Vegas; and the practice of Elliott I. Greenspan, DO, PC, in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. The five practices have a combined total of about 43,000 encounters a year.

IPC: The Hospitalist Company Inc. also has announced a management transition as part of its chief financial officer succession plan. Richard H. Kline has joined IPC as CFO; the company’s longtime CFO, Devra G. Shapiro, will become its chief administrative officer.

Dr. Li

SHM’s committees shape the future of HM. And you can be a part of that future by nominating yourself or colleagues for one of SHM’s committees, which cover topics from information technology to early career hospitalists and patient safety.

“The vision and the commitment of SHM’s committees are really what keep SHM and hospitalists ahead of the pack,” says SHM president Joseph Ming-Wah Li, MD, MPH, SFHM. “Getting involved in a committee that is relevant to your practice is a great way to share your passion for your work and connect with some of the most influential leaders in our growing specialty.”

Most committees meet regularly via conference call and meet once a year in person at the SHM annual meeting.

The deadline for nominations is Dec. 5. Interested SHM members can learn more by visiting www.hospitalmedicine.org/committees.

Dr. Li

SHM’s committees shape the future of HM. And you can be a part of that future by nominating yourself or colleagues for one of SHM’s committees, which cover topics from information technology to early career hospitalists and patient safety.

“The vision and the commitment of SHM’s committees are really what keep SHM and hospitalists ahead of the pack,” says SHM president Joseph Ming-Wah Li, MD, MPH, SFHM. “Getting involved in a committee that is relevant to your practice is a great way to share your passion for your work and connect with some of the most influential leaders in our growing specialty.”

Most committees meet regularly via conference call and meet once a year in person at the SHM annual meeting.

The deadline for nominations is Dec. 5. Interested SHM members can learn more by visiting www.hospitalmedicine.org/committees.

Dr. Li

SHM’s committees shape the future of HM. And you can be a part of that future by nominating yourself or colleagues for one of SHM’s committees, which cover topics from information technology to early career hospitalists and patient safety.

“The vision and the commitment of SHM’s committees are really what keep SHM and hospitalists ahead of the pack,” says SHM president Joseph Ming-Wah Li, MD, MPH, SFHM. “Getting involved in a committee that is relevant to your practice is a great way to share your passion for your work and connect with some of the most influential leaders in our growing specialty.”

Most committees meet regularly via conference call and meet once a year in person at the SHM annual meeting.

The deadline for nominations is Dec. 5. Interested SHM members can learn more by visiting www.hospitalmedicine.org/committees.

As with many specialties, female leaders in HM sometimes face different challenges than their male counterparts.

That’s why the next Leadership Academy, Feb. 13-16 in New Orleans, will include special programming specifically designed for women. Program elements include a networking session for female leaders in HM and educational sessions created for them.

“As hospital medicine continues to grow, so will the opportunities for women to become leaders within their hospitals and their hospitalist practices,” says Patience Reich, MD, SFHM. “The Leadership Academy in February will give women the chance to sharpen their leadership skills and share their own experiences with other women in the specialty.”

As part of the special programming for female leaders in healthcare, former healthcare executive and executive coach Kay Cannon will present a special seminar on women in HM. She will share her wisdom about career advancement essentials for the next generation of female leaders.

The academy features two four-day courses: “Foundations for Effective Leadership,” which is presented at every Leadership Academy, and “Advanced Leadership: Strengthening Your Organization,” which is presented once a year.

“Foundations for Effective Leadership” gives participants the primary tools necessary to become a successful HM leader and is the prerequisite for the other two courses in the series. “Advanced Leadership: Strengthening Your Organization” builds on the skills learned in “Foundations” and teaches hospitalists to better grow, manage, and motivate teams.

All SHM Leadership Academy courses are eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 credits.

The New Orleans academy also marks the second Leadership Academy opportunity for hospitalists to learn about SHM’s new Leadership Certification program. By guiding candidates through all three academy courses and a leadership project, Leadership Certification gives hospitalists a new way to tangibly demonstrate their leadership qualifications to their employers—and potential employers.

For more information, visit www.hospitalmedicine.org/leadership.

As with many specialties, female leaders in HM sometimes face different challenges than their male counterparts.

That’s why the next Leadership Academy, Feb. 13-16 in New Orleans, will include special programming specifically designed for women. Program elements include a networking session for female leaders in HM and educational sessions created for them.

“As hospital medicine continues to grow, so will the opportunities for women to become leaders within their hospitals and their hospitalist practices,” says Patience Reich, MD, SFHM. “The Leadership Academy in February will give women the chance to sharpen their leadership skills and share their own experiences with other women in the specialty.”

As part of the special programming for female leaders in healthcare, former healthcare executive and executive coach Kay Cannon will present a special seminar on women in HM. She will share her wisdom about career advancement essentials for the next generation of female leaders.

The academy features two four-day courses: “Foundations for Effective Leadership,” which is presented at every Leadership Academy, and “Advanced Leadership: Strengthening Your Organization,” which is presented once a year.

“Foundations for Effective Leadership” gives participants the primary tools necessary to become a successful HM leader and is the prerequisite for the other two courses in the series. “Advanced Leadership: Strengthening Your Organization” builds on the skills learned in “Foundations” and teaches hospitalists to better grow, manage, and motivate teams.

All SHM Leadership Academy courses are eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 credits.

The New Orleans academy also marks the second Leadership Academy opportunity for hospitalists to learn about SHM’s new Leadership Certification program. By guiding candidates through all three academy courses and a leadership project, Leadership Certification gives hospitalists a new way to tangibly demonstrate their leadership qualifications to their employers—and potential employers.

For more information, visit www.hospitalmedicine.org/leadership.

As with many specialties, female leaders in HM sometimes face different challenges than their male counterparts.

That’s why the next Leadership Academy, Feb. 13-16 in New Orleans, will include special programming specifically designed for women. Program elements include a networking session for female leaders in HM and educational sessions created for them.

“As hospital medicine continues to grow, so will the opportunities for women to become leaders within their hospitals and their hospitalist practices,” says Patience Reich, MD, SFHM. “The Leadership Academy in February will give women the chance to sharpen their leadership skills and share their own experiences with other women in the specialty.”

As part of the special programming for female leaders in healthcare, former healthcare executive and executive coach Kay Cannon will present a special seminar on women in HM. She will share her wisdom about career advancement essentials for the next generation of female leaders.

The academy features two four-day courses: “Foundations for Effective Leadership,” which is presented at every Leadership Academy, and “Advanced Leadership: Strengthening Your Organization,” which is presented once a year.

“Foundations for Effective Leadership” gives participants the primary tools necessary to become a successful HM leader and is the prerequisite for the other two courses in the series. “Advanced Leadership: Strengthening Your Organization” builds on the skills learned in “Foundations” and teaches hospitalists to better grow, manage, and motivate teams.

All SHM Leadership Academy courses are eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 credits.

The New Orleans academy also marks the second Leadership Academy opportunity for hospitalists to learn about SHM’s new Leadership Certification program. By guiding candidates through all three academy courses and a leadership project, Leadership Certification gives hospitalists a new way to tangibly demonstrate their leadership qualifications to their employers—and potential employers.

For more information, visit www.hospitalmedicine.org/leadership.

The role of visiting professor brings an additional level of credibility and academic rigor to SHM’s annual meeting. This year’s visiting professor’s interests and experience are perfect fits for hospital medicine.

Pamela A. Lipsett, MD, MHPE, FACS, FCCM, will serve as visiting professor at HM12, April 1-4 in San Diego. Dr. Lipsett is a professor in the department of surgery, anesthesiology, and critical-care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Medicine and Nursing in Baltimore. In addition, she is the program director of general surgery and the surgical critical-care fellowship, and is co-director of the surgical ICUs at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The roles that visiting professors play at SHM’s annual meeting vary, but more often than not, they preside over the popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) competition and provide guidance to hospitalist attendees.

Dr. Lipsett’s scholarly interests are especially suited to HM12, as much of her research has focused on the hospitalized patient. Among a host of topics, she has researched antibiotic management, hand hygiene, and the psychological issues of hospitalization and long-term follow-up of prolonged ICU stays.

For more information about Dr. Lipsett and HM12, visit www.hospitalmedicine2012.org.

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

The role of visiting professor brings an additional level of credibility and academic rigor to SHM’s annual meeting. This year’s visiting professor’s interests and experience are perfect fits for hospital medicine.

Pamela A. Lipsett, MD, MHPE, FACS, FCCM, will serve as visiting professor at HM12, April 1-4 in San Diego. Dr. Lipsett is a professor in the department of surgery, anesthesiology, and critical-care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Medicine and Nursing in Baltimore. In addition, she is the program director of general surgery and the surgical critical-care fellowship, and is co-director of the surgical ICUs at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The roles that visiting professors play at SHM’s annual meeting vary, but more often than not, they preside over the popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) competition and provide guidance to hospitalist attendees.

Dr. Lipsett’s scholarly interests are especially suited to HM12, as much of her research has focused on the hospitalized patient. Among a host of topics, she has researched antibiotic management, hand hygiene, and the psychological issues of hospitalization and long-term follow-up of prolonged ICU stays.

For more information about Dr. Lipsett and HM12, visit www.hospitalmedicine2012.org.

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

The role of visiting professor brings an additional level of credibility and academic rigor to SHM’s annual meeting. This year’s visiting professor’s interests and experience are perfect fits for hospital medicine.

Pamela A. Lipsett, MD, MHPE, FACS, FCCM, will serve as visiting professor at HM12, April 1-4 in San Diego. Dr. Lipsett is a professor in the department of surgery, anesthesiology, and critical-care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Medicine and Nursing in Baltimore. In addition, she is the program director of general surgery and the surgical critical-care fellowship, and is co-director of the surgical ICUs at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The roles that visiting professors play at SHM’s annual meeting vary, but more often than not, they preside over the popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) competition and provide guidance to hospitalist attendees.

Dr. Lipsett’s scholarly interests are especially suited to HM12, as much of her research has focused on the hospitalized patient. Among a host of topics, she has researched antibiotic management, hand hygiene, and the psychological issues of hospitalization and long-term follow-up of prolonged ICU stays.

For more information about Dr. Lipsett and HM12, visit www.hospitalmedicine2012.org.

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

Academic hospitalists will find new opportunities to learn, network, and showcase their own insights at HM12, SHM’s annual meeting April 1-4 in San Diego.

This year, poster presenters will have even more time to present cutting-edge topics in hospital medicine. The popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) poster sessions will be split into two days.

The Research and Innovations poster reception will be held 5 to 7 p.m. April 2, while the Vignettes poster session will be held during lunch the next day. However, some things about the receptions won’t change: Sessions will be held in the exhibit hall.

The move to two poster receptions was in response to previous attendee feedback. As the numbers of attendees and poster presenters has grown, visiting all the posters and having meaningful conversations with the presenters became increasingly difficult. Now attendees—both academic and community-based hospitalist—can take their time and soak in more of the best thinking in the specialty.

If you’re thinking about submitting a poster for any of the three categories, now is the time to act: The submission deadline for abstracts is Dec. 2.

Poster sessions aren’t the only new chances for academic hospitalists to find valuable face time at HM12, either. This year’s program includes new opportunities to collaborate and connect with other academic hospitalists—and hospitalists from other backgrounds as well.

And the HM12 schedule will feature valuable courses specifically chosen for the unique needs and challenges of the academic hospitalist’s career.

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

Academic hospitalists will find new opportunities to learn, network, and showcase their own insights at HM12, SHM’s annual meeting April 1-4 in San Diego.

This year, poster presenters will have even more time to present cutting-edge topics in hospital medicine. The popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) poster sessions will be split into two days.

The Research and Innovations poster reception will be held 5 to 7 p.m. April 2, while the Vignettes poster session will be held during lunch the next day. However, some things about the receptions won’t change: Sessions will be held in the exhibit hall.

The move to two poster receptions was in response to previous attendee feedback. As the numbers of attendees and poster presenters has grown, visiting all the posters and having meaningful conversations with the presenters became increasingly difficult. Now attendees—both academic and community-based hospitalist—can take their time and soak in more of the best thinking in the specialty.

If you’re thinking about submitting a poster for any of the three categories, now is the time to act: The submission deadline for abstracts is Dec. 2.

Poster sessions aren’t the only new chances for academic hospitalists to find valuable face time at HM12, either. This year’s program includes new opportunities to collaborate and connect with other academic hospitalists—and hospitalists from other backgrounds as well.

And the HM12 schedule will feature valuable courses specifically chosen for the unique needs and challenges of the academic hospitalist’s career.

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

Academic hospitalists will find new opportunities to learn, network, and showcase their own insights at HM12, SHM’s annual meeting April 1-4 in San Diego.

This year, poster presenters will have even more time to present cutting-edge topics in hospital medicine. The popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) poster sessions will be split into two days.

The Research and Innovations poster reception will be held 5 to 7 p.m. April 2, while the Vignettes poster session will be held during lunch the next day. However, some things about the receptions won’t change: Sessions will be held in the exhibit hall.

The move to two poster receptions was in response to previous attendee feedback. As the numbers of attendees and poster presenters has grown, visiting all the posters and having meaningful conversations with the presenters became increasingly difficult. Now attendees—both academic and community-based hospitalist—can take their time and soak in more of the best thinking in the specialty.

If you’re thinking about submitting a poster for any of the three categories, now is the time to act: The submission deadline for abstracts is Dec. 2.

Poster sessions aren’t the only new chances for academic hospitalists to find valuable face time at HM12, either. This year’s program includes new opportunities to collaborate and connect with other academic hospitalists—and hospitalists from other backgrounds as well.

And the HM12 schedule will feature valuable courses specifically chosen for the unique needs and challenges of the academic hospitalist’s career.

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

For hospitalists, SHM’s annual meeting is more than an educational conference; it’s an extended family reunion. And with HM12 located in sunny San Diego, the next meeting is a conference, vacation, and family reunion wrapped into one.

Like other family reunions, members of the HM family come to connect with others, catch up on recent experiences, and learn from each other.

“I'm really looking forward to the people,” says HM12 course director Jeff Glasheen, MD, SFHM, associate professor of medicine and director of the hospital medicine group at the University of Colorado Denver. “I attend a lot of CME meetings, and the one thing that sets HM12 apart is the people. It’s a chance for me to reconnect with old friends and make future old friends.”

For hospitalists who are new to SHM or considering going to their first annual meeting, Dr. Glasheen says the experience will be pivotal.

“There simply isn’t a better way to network, learn, and re-energize than coming to the annual meeting,” he says. “I can guarantee first-time attendees will find the annual meeting career-altering. I did, nine years ago, and I hear from new attendees every year that it happens for them as well.”

Registration is open at www.hospitalmedicine2012.org.

There simply isn’t a better way to network, learn, and re-energize than coming to the annual meeting. I can guarantee first-time attendees will find the annual meeting career-altering.

—Jeffrey Glasheen, MD, SFHM, HM12 course director

HM12: Off the Beaten Path

In recent years, SHM has presented educational content at the annual meeting in a series of tracks: clinical, academic, pediatric, evidence-based rapid fire, workshops, practice management, and quality. Those tracks help hospitalists identify the courses that will be most pertinent to their careers and daily life.

HM12 introduces a new innovation to the content: pathways. Not all courses fit squarely into the categories presented into the tracks, so pathways give hospitalists the chance to identify the most relevant talks from the different tracks.

To illustrate the pathways concept, Dr. Glasheen uses the example of a hospitalist who is interested in quality improvement (QI). Although there is a quality track, there are quality and safety presentations throughout the conference. The quality pathway will quickly allow the attendee to identify these out of the myriad talks contained in the four-day meeting.”

“Additionally, if you are a nurse practitioner or interested in palliative care, you'll be able to choose the NP or palliative-care pathway to immediately identify the sessions that might be most applicable to you,” he says. “You don't have to go to only those sessions, but the pathways will serve as an easy reference to identify the areas of most interest to you.”

And, in recognition of the broad spectrum of nonclinical topics that hospitalists cover, HM12 will present a “potpourri” track for the first time. This track will help round out the meeting by offering such nonclinical topics as “The History of Hospitals,” “Using Art to Improve Your Clinical Observation Skills,” and “Professionalism in the Digital Age”—topics that will help make the meeting, and hospitalists, more holistic.

Improvements aren’t limited to courses, either. HM12 organizers have split the popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) poster session into two sessions: one for research and innovations, the other for vignettes. Organizers say this will allow RIV participants more time to review the hundreds of posters presented at the annual meeting.

“We’ve heard the feedback that there just wasn’t enough time to get to the hundreds of posters that were presented at last year’s meeting,” Dr. Glasheen says. “By splitting this into two different sessions, we think this will make the poster sessions that much stronger.”

Networking

SHM’s annual meeting always serves as a forum for enterprising hospitalists to make connections and advance careers. For those hospitalists, HM12 will provide unprecedented time and opportunities to connect with peers and leaders in the specialty.

To many hospitalists, including Dr. Glasheen, the biggest benefit of attending SHM’s annual meeting isn’t the feeling in the conference center—it’s the feeling they take with them.

“Every year, I come away from the meeting reinvigorated and refreshed,” he says. “Much of that comes from the energy I get from spending four days with smart, motivated, and highly engaged hospitalists. It’s the one time every year where I feel firsthand how great it is to be a part of the society—small ‘s’—of hospital medicine.”

That sense of connection is what makes the specialty unique and full of energy, he adds. “These are my colleagues on a national level, this is our field, these people are our present and future, and it’s great to spend some time learning with—and from—all of them.”

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

For hospitalists, SHM’s annual meeting is more than an educational conference; it’s an extended family reunion. And with HM12 located in sunny San Diego, the next meeting is a conference, vacation, and family reunion wrapped into one.

Like other family reunions, members of the HM family come to connect with others, catch up on recent experiences, and learn from each other.

“I'm really looking forward to the people,” says HM12 course director Jeff Glasheen, MD, SFHM, associate professor of medicine and director of the hospital medicine group at the University of Colorado Denver. “I attend a lot of CME meetings, and the one thing that sets HM12 apart is the people. It’s a chance for me to reconnect with old friends and make future old friends.”

For hospitalists who are new to SHM or considering going to their first annual meeting, Dr. Glasheen says the experience will be pivotal.

“There simply isn’t a better way to network, learn, and re-energize than coming to the annual meeting,” he says. “I can guarantee first-time attendees will find the annual meeting career-altering. I did, nine years ago, and I hear from new attendees every year that it happens for them as well.”

Registration is open at www.hospitalmedicine2012.org.

There simply isn’t a better way to network, learn, and re-energize than coming to the annual meeting. I can guarantee first-time attendees will find the annual meeting career-altering.

—Jeffrey Glasheen, MD, SFHM, HM12 course director

HM12: Off the Beaten Path

In recent years, SHM has presented educational content at the annual meeting in a series of tracks: clinical, academic, pediatric, evidence-based rapid fire, workshops, practice management, and quality. Those tracks help hospitalists identify the courses that will be most pertinent to their careers and daily life.

HM12 introduces a new innovation to the content: pathways. Not all courses fit squarely into the categories presented into the tracks, so pathways give hospitalists the chance to identify the most relevant talks from the different tracks.

To illustrate the pathways concept, Dr. Glasheen uses the example of a hospitalist who is interested in quality improvement (QI). Although there is a quality track, there are quality and safety presentations throughout the conference. The quality pathway will quickly allow the attendee to identify these out of the myriad talks contained in the four-day meeting.”

“Additionally, if you are a nurse practitioner or interested in palliative care, you'll be able to choose the NP or palliative-care pathway to immediately identify the sessions that might be most applicable to you,” he says. “You don't have to go to only those sessions, but the pathways will serve as an easy reference to identify the areas of most interest to you.”

And, in recognition of the broad spectrum of nonclinical topics that hospitalists cover, HM12 will present a “potpourri” track for the first time. This track will help round out the meeting by offering such nonclinical topics as “The History of Hospitals,” “Using Art to Improve Your Clinical Observation Skills,” and “Professionalism in the Digital Age”—topics that will help make the meeting, and hospitalists, more holistic.

Improvements aren’t limited to courses, either. HM12 organizers have split the popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) poster session into two sessions: one for research and innovations, the other for vignettes. Organizers say this will allow RIV participants more time to review the hundreds of posters presented at the annual meeting.

“We’ve heard the feedback that there just wasn’t enough time to get to the hundreds of posters that were presented at last year’s meeting,” Dr. Glasheen says. “By splitting this into two different sessions, we think this will make the poster sessions that much stronger.”

Networking

SHM’s annual meeting always serves as a forum for enterprising hospitalists to make connections and advance careers. For those hospitalists, HM12 will provide unprecedented time and opportunities to connect with peers and leaders in the specialty.

To many hospitalists, including Dr. Glasheen, the biggest benefit of attending SHM’s annual meeting isn’t the feeling in the conference center—it’s the feeling they take with them.

“Every year, I come away from the meeting reinvigorated and refreshed,” he says. “Much of that comes from the energy I get from spending four days with smart, motivated, and highly engaged hospitalists. It’s the one time every year where I feel firsthand how great it is to be a part of the society—small ‘s’—of hospital medicine.”

That sense of connection is what makes the specialty unique and full of energy, he adds. “These are my colleagues on a national level, this is our field, these people are our present and future, and it’s great to spend some time learning with—and from—all of them.”

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

For hospitalists, SHM’s annual meeting is more than an educational conference; it’s an extended family reunion. And with HM12 located in sunny San Diego, the next meeting is a conference, vacation, and family reunion wrapped into one.

Like other family reunions, members of the HM family come to connect with others, catch up on recent experiences, and learn from each other.

“I'm really looking forward to the people,” says HM12 course director Jeff Glasheen, MD, SFHM, associate professor of medicine and director of the hospital medicine group at the University of Colorado Denver. “I attend a lot of CME meetings, and the one thing that sets HM12 apart is the people. It’s a chance for me to reconnect with old friends and make future old friends.”

For hospitalists who are new to SHM or considering going to their first annual meeting, Dr. Glasheen says the experience will be pivotal.

“There simply isn’t a better way to network, learn, and re-energize than coming to the annual meeting,” he says. “I can guarantee first-time attendees will find the annual meeting career-altering. I did, nine years ago, and I hear from new attendees every year that it happens for them as well.”

Registration is open at www.hospitalmedicine2012.org.

There simply isn’t a better way to network, learn, and re-energize than coming to the annual meeting. I can guarantee first-time attendees will find the annual meeting career-altering.

—Jeffrey Glasheen, MD, SFHM, HM12 course director

HM12: Off the Beaten Path

In recent years, SHM has presented educational content at the annual meeting in a series of tracks: clinical, academic, pediatric, evidence-based rapid fire, workshops, practice management, and quality. Those tracks help hospitalists identify the courses that will be most pertinent to their careers and daily life.

HM12 introduces a new innovation to the content: pathways. Not all courses fit squarely into the categories presented into the tracks, so pathways give hospitalists the chance to identify the most relevant talks from the different tracks.

To illustrate the pathways concept, Dr. Glasheen uses the example of a hospitalist who is interested in quality improvement (QI). Although there is a quality track, there are quality and safety presentations throughout the conference. The quality pathway will quickly allow the attendee to identify these out of the myriad talks contained in the four-day meeting.”

“Additionally, if you are a nurse practitioner or interested in palliative care, you'll be able to choose the NP or palliative-care pathway to immediately identify the sessions that might be most applicable to you,” he says. “You don't have to go to only those sessions, but the pathways will serve as an easy reference to identify the areas of most interest to you.”

And, in recognition of the broad spectrum of nonclinical topics that hospitalists cover, HM12 will present a “potpourri” track for the first time. This track will help round out the meeting by offering such nonclinical topics as “The History of Hospitals,” “Using Art to Improve Your Clinical Observation Skills,” and “Professionalism in the Digital Age”—topics that will help make the meeting, and hospitalists, more holistic.

Improvements aren’t limited to courses, either. HM12 organizers have split the popular Research, Innovation, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) poster session into two sessions: one for research and innovations, the other for vignettes. Organizers say this will allow RIV participants more time to review the hundreds of posters presented at the annual meeting.

“We’ve heard the feedback that there just wasn’t enough time to get to the hundreds of posters that were presented at last year’s meeting,” Dr. Glasheen says. “By splitting this into two different sessions, we think this will make the poster sessions that much stronger.”

Networking

SHM’s annual meeting always serves as a forum for enterprising hospitalists to make connections and advance careers. For those hospitalists, HM12 will provide unprecedented time and opportunities to connect with peers and leaders in the specialty.

To many hospitalists, including Dr. Glasheen, the biggest benefit of attending SHM’s annual meeting isn’t the feeling in the conference center—it’s the feeling they take with them.

“Every year, I come away from the meeting reinvigorated and refreshed,” he says. “Much of that comes from the energy I get from spending four days with smart, motivated, and highly engaged hospitalists. It’s the one time every year where I feel firsthand how great it is to be a part of the society—small ‘s’—of hospital medicine.”

That sense of connection is what makes the specialty unique and full of energy, he adds. “These are my colleagues on a national level, this is our field, these people are our present and future, and it’s great to spend some time learning with—and from—all of them.”

Brendon Shank is SHM’s associate vice president of communications.

They both were working the day the planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. They saw the twin towers crash to the ground, the soot and debris covering lower Manhattan, and the puzzled faces of loved ones searching for information in the EDs of their hospitals. And while the memories are vivid and the shock of the terror still resides in them, they have chosen distinctly different paths since the 9/11 attacks 10 years ago.

Born and raised in Queens, Adam Trosterman, MD, grew up looking at the World Trade Center from his apartment window, studied medicine at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Manhattan, and was the intern on call for trauma surgery at NYU Bellevue the day of the attack. Today, he works as a hospitalist in Colorado and plans to spend Sept. 11 biking in the peaceful altitudes of the Rocky Mountains.

“I will probably go for a bike ride with my wife and enjoy some fresh air,” Dr. Trosterman says. “I don’t plan anything special, but I think about [Sept. 11] and I don’t think about October 11.”

A mere 10 blocks south of NYU Bellevue, straight down First Avenue, Dahlia Rizk, DO, was the hospitalist program director at Beth Israel Medical Center and in the middle of grand rounds when she first heard about the attacks on the twin towers. She has since moved to Battery Park, just a few blocks from the construction site for the new World Trade Center, and plans to participate in the 9/11 anniversary ceremony.

“I think that the memorial, the new building, and that whole area is just coming alive again. It is a real testament to the resilience of New Yorkers. Honoring the victims and their families is just so important. It’s such an incredible thing,” Dr. Rizk says. “I’m looking forward to the remembrance and celebrating the human spirit.”

Two physicians, two hospitalists, two human beings: They look back at 9/11 in diverse yet illuminating ways. These are their stories.

The Intern

A self-described New Yorker, Dr. Trosterman remembers Sept. 11, 2001, as a “beautiful, gorgeous morning” in which the sun was high and the temperature was pleasant. He, however, was in poor spirits, as everyone at NYU Bellevue “hated to be on trauma surgery” rotation. He was 29, single, and, as he puts it, “having a very good time” living in Manhattan.

He arrived at work at 6 a.m. and went about the basic duties of every first-year resident on trauma surgery rotation, rounding with two of his colleagues on 15 patients. At about 8:30 a.m., he ran into another surgery intern who informed him there was a “big trauma coming, something to do with a plane, you might want to check it out.”

Big traumas in New York City are a regular occurrence, and after nearly three months on, he says, he was “pretty well versed in how to run the trauma service. You grow up fast.”

“Back in 2001, you grew up really fast,” he adds. “There were no work-hour regulations; I was working 115 hours per week.”

Dr. Trosterman ran to his trauma slots in the ED—they were “acting weird,” he notes—and began setting up the four trauma beds for the unknown mass-casualty incident (MCI). “It took maybe five minutes,” he says. “Then I got a call from one of my colleagues who was a neurosurgery intern. He starts describing to me what happened, and tells me to come up to the ICU.”

Bellevue’s ICU is on the 15th floor, with an unobstructed view of lower Manhattan. When he got there, Dr. Trosterman had a perfect view of the horror at the World Trade Center. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” he recalls. “There was a humongous hole in the tower. At that point, I almost started laughing to myself. Not really, of course, but … we had to mobilize a whole different system, which, of course, I was a part of. But it was no longer my typical role for trauma.”

The first patient Dr. Trosterman saw that morning was pronounced dead on arrival. Ironically, he says, the patient looked a lot like his best friend’s stepfather, who worked in the World Trade Center. “They were like parents to me,” he says. “I couldn’t get through. It wasn’t until the second day that I could make a call. I don’t think I spoke to them until Sept. 13.” (Fortunately, everyone Dr. Trosterman knew who worked in the towers survived.)

The next patient Dr. Trosterman saw was a police officer who had a dislocated shoulder and a small fracture. He was screaming and it was difficult to tell if his outbursts were pain-related, Dr. Trosterman says. “He was ranting about what had happened—appropriately ranting,” he says. “He was saying, ‘My partner was at my side and I was trying to save him, but I knew I couldn’t get him out and save myself. I just had to run or I would’ve died. I left my partner to die. I left my partner to die.’ It was horrible. He probably still feels guilty about it right now.”

Contrary to some reports, Dr. Trosterman says, Bellevue and other New York City hospitals were overwhelmed with work, if not injured patients. Much of the work following the attacks was moving inpatients to free up space for casualties. The trauma service ballooned by 40 patients. “We saw more people than we ever see,” he says, “and, literally, the same number of doctors. I was, physically, unbelievably busy. I was emotionally worried about my friend and his family, and I hadn’t had contact with anyone for 48 hours. … I was frustrated that all I kept hearing on the radio was that there were no patients. I was like, ‘You need to come visit me and see what I’m doing!’ It was nonstop and nobody was alive.”

The saddest part really was the faces. I remember a college friend of mine actually coming and looking for his girlfriend’s family member at the time, and I just remember how horrified these family members were going from hospital to hospital throughout the city looking for loved ones.

—Dahlia Rizk, DO, hospitalist program director, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York City

Dr. Trosterman cared for dozens of patients on 9/11, working into the wee hours of the night (see “The Most Interesting Patient,” below). He was told to go home at 3:30 a.m. but had to return to work at 6 a.m. He says walking out of the hospital that night was like walking through the morgue.

“Manhattan is one of the most happening places, and downtown Manhattan, it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, there’s always somebody in the street and there’s always something open,” he says. “Everything was closed, dead, silent, scary, barren. It was the most surreal thing I can ever remember in my life.”

In the midst of the chaos and confusion, loneliness and isolation replaced communication.

“Everyone was working, working, working, but no one was talking,” Dr. Trosterman says. “When I look back on that day, I feel angry, frustrated, scared, weird....While there weren’t 1,000 people [to save], those 10 or 15 lives that were saved, that were critically ill, were unbelievably important to the doctors who were taking care of them—no one knows about that.”

The Optimist

Ten years ago, Dr. Rizk was director of a three-hospitalist HM service at Beth Israel Medical Center; now the program has 26 FTE hospitalists and 15 physician assistants on staff. She was running late to grand rounds that day, coffee in hand as she passed a television and saw the first news reports of an airplane crashing into the first tower. Moments later, the hospital activated its disaster protocol, and Dr. Rizk rounded up her hospitalists.

“We very rapidly started discharging patients,” she recalls. “I actually went up to the 11th floor of our hospital and could see at that time that the second tower had been hit. It was almost like a dream, like a horrible nightmare. We could see the skyline changing when the first tower dropped. I could hear the sirens and see the smoke that was filling the air.

“We started to create triage stations outside our ED, and we had all the physicians at the hospital available. The ED was pretty chaotic in terms of the throughput. There wasn’t clear instruction; we didn’t know what was happening. ... There was a lot of debris and scratches and fractures that came through our ED.

continued below...

The MOST Interesting Patient

Although his 9/11 was chaotic, stressful, and exhausting, Dr. Trosterman didn’t perform many miracles on survivors. Even so, he does have an interesting story to tell about Port Authority officer John McLoughlin.

“He was buried under the rubble. They found him and dug him out” on Sept. 12, says Dr. Trosterman, who was the on-call intern for trauma surgery at NYU Bellevue. “He had massive crush injuries to his leg. … He was brought into the hospital and taken to the operating room.”

The surgical team saved McLoughlin’s limbs, but he slipped into a coma. Dr. Trosterman was in charge of the post-care unit in which the officer was assigned.

“I remember being yelled at by multiple trauma surgeons, telling me what to do,” he recalls. “I had to watch this guy and make sure he didn’t die overnight. That was the most traumatic patient, but he was also the most famous, celebrated man in New York City at the time.”

McLoughlin would stay in the coma for six weeks and endure 27 additional surgeries. After about six weeks of recovery and rehab, he was discharged. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited, taking pictures as he walked out of the hospital. McLoughlin’s story was portrayed in the Oliver Stone movie World Trade Center.

“His entire first night, when he was on death’s door, it was probably the only thing I actually did to save anyone during 9/11,” Dr. Trosterman says. “The only thing I really did was stay with him all night long. I did everything I could to make sure he stayed alive.

“And he did. I just paid super-close attention to him.” —JC

I remember very clearly standing outside of the ED as well, mostly greeting families who were looking for loved ones throughout the course of the day and collecting photographs that we posted on the wall for missing loved ones. And I remember these chilling feelings; there were so few people that were coming in that were in critical condition. I knew that this was not where they would find these patients.”

Beth Israel was not the Level 1 trauma center for lower Manhattan at the time; the now-shuttered St. Vincent’s Hospital was the go-to ED for mass casualty incidents. “They probably got the brunt of those patients, if there were any,” Dr. Rizk says. “I don’t know how many, but I can tell you from the hospitalist standpoint on the inpatient side, there was very little that was done.”

Most of the patients at Beth Israel were wheezing, needing eyewashes, or tending to scrapes and cuts. Dr. Rizk says many of the beds cleared for traumas sat empty. “We were ready, but so little happened in terms of activity on the inpatient side,” she says. “The saddest part really was the faces. I remember a college friend of mine actually coming and looking for his girlfriend’s family member at the time, and I just remember how horrified these family members were going from hospital to hospital throughout the city looking for loved ones.”

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11, Dr. Rizk says, a heavy feeling permeated the city. “Simple things like groceries and shops and restaurants—not that anyone felt like doing that—they just weren’t available,” she says. “Everybody was on foot trying to sort out what happened.”

Her brother-in-law, who worked in the building next to the towers, survived. Others she knew did not. An elementary school friend—a firefighter who rushed into the towers after the attacks—did not make it out. A close friend had an uncle, the head of the Brooklyn fire battalion, who lost his life, too. She attended his funeral.

The months that followed the attacks were “chilling” and “empty,” she says, as the soot covered the community and sorrow pierced those who lived and worked near ground zero.

Since then, Dr. Rizk has watched an “amazing” transformation in lower Manhattan. And it’s not just construction on the new 104-story Freedom Tower or the names of victims etched into the marble fountain walls, but the trees and momentum building for the 10-year anniversary.

“Just to see that renewed hope—it’s exciting,” she says. “I live down there now and am constantly reminded, every day, as I pass ground zero. I am amazed by how resilient the city is. The whole area is coming alive again.”

Dr. Rizk hopes to attend the 9/11 memorial service this month to honor the heroes and applaud New York’s future.

“[It’s] just a symbol of strength and hope for the future of people living together,” she says, “and to recognize that we all have the fundamental human commonality, and we really need to focus on how to move forward as a society—working together as a common goal.”

Jason Carris is editor of The Hospitalist.

Memorial Plaza Opening Highlights 9/11 Anniversary

President Obama and former President George W. Bush will participate in the 10th anniversary ceremony of the Sept. 11 attacks, which will mark the first time the names of all the people killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the field in Shanksville, Pa., will be read aloud during the ceremony. Obama, Bush, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and others will give pre-selected readings; no dignitaries will make speeches, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The memorial plaza, which features two large squares where the World Trade Center stood, is set to open on the anniversary for families and dignitaries only, and to the public the following day. The names of all of the approximately 3,000 victims are etched into the walls of the memorial.

An underground museum at the site will open in late 2012.

Eighty of the 104 stories in the office tower that will be known as One World Trade Center are expected to be complete for the anniversary. It will be the tallest building in Manhattan. An underground transit center is under construction, as are privately developed office towers in the area. —JC

They both were working the day the planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. They saw the twin towers crash to the ground, the soot and debris covering lower Manhattan, and the puzzled faces of loved ones searching for information in the EDs of their hospitals. And while the memories are vivid and the shock of the terror still resides in them, they have chosen distinctly different paths since the 9/11 attacks 10 years ago.

Born and raised in Queens, Adam Trosterman, MD, grew up looking at the World Trade Center from his apartment window, studied medicine at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Manhattan, and was the intern on call for trauma surgery at NYU Bellevue the day of the attack. Today, he works as a hospitalist in Colorado and plans to spend Sept. 11 biking in the peaceful altitudes of the Rocky Mountains.

“I will probably go for a bike ride with my wife and enjoy some fresh air,” Dr. Trosterman says. “I don’t plan anything special, but I think about [Sept. 11] and I don’t think about October 11.”

A mere 10 blocks south of NYU Bellevue, straight down First Avenue, Dahlia Rizk, DO, was the hospitalist program director at Beth Israel Medical Center and in the middle of grand rounds when she first heard about the attacks on the twin towers. She has since moved to Battery Park, just a few blocks from the construction site for the new World Trade Center, and plans to participate in the 9/11 anniversary ceremony.

“I think that the memorial, the new building, and that whole area is just coming alive again. It is a real testament to the resilience of New Yorkers. Honoring the victims and their families is just so important. It’s such an incredible thing,” Dr. Rizk says. “I’m looking forward to the remembrance and celebrating the human spirit.”

Two physicians, two hospitalists, two human beings: They look back at 9/11 in diverse yet illuminating ways. These are their stories.

The Intern

A self-described New Yorker, Dr. Trosterman remembers Sept. 11, 2001, as a “beautiful, gorgeous morning” in which the sun was high and the temperature was pleasant. He, however, was in poor spirits, as everyone at NYU Bellevue “hated to be on trauma surgery” rotation. He was 29, single, and, as he puts it, “having a very good time” living in Manhattan.

He arrived at work at 6 a.m. and went about the basic duties of every first-year resident on trauma surgery rotation, rounding with two of his colleagues on 15 patients. At about 8:30 a.m., he ran into another surgery intern who informed him there was a “big trauma coming, something to do with a plane, you might want to check it out.”

Big traumas in New York City are a regular occurrence, and after nearly three months on, he says, he was “pretty well versed in how to run the trauma service. You grow up fast.”

“Back in 2001, you grew up really fast,” he adds. “There were no work-hour regulations; I was working 115 hours per week.”

Dr. Trosterman ran to his trauma slots in the ED—they were “acting weird,” he notes—and began setting up the four trauma beds for the unknown mass-casualty incident (MCI). “It took maybe five minutes,” he says. “Then I got a call from one of my colleagues who was a neurosurgery intern. He starts describing to me what happened, and tells me to come up to the ICU.”

Bellevue’s ICU is on the 15th floor, with an unobstructed view of lower Manhattan. When he got there, Dr. Trosterman had a perfect view of the horror at the World Trade Center. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” he recalls. “There was a humongous hole in the tower. At that point, I almost started laughing to myself. Not really, of course, but … we had to mobilize a whole different system, which, of course, I was a part of. But it was no longer my typical role for trauma.”

The first patient Dr. Trosterman saw that morning was pronounced dead on arrival. Ironically, he says, the patient looked a lot like his best friend’s stepfather, who worked in the World Trade Center. “They were like parents to me,” he says. “I couldn’t get through. It wasn’t until the second day that I could make a call. I don’t think I spoke to them until Sept. 13.” (Fortunately, everyone Dr. Trosterman knew who worked in the towers survived.)

The next patient Dr. Trosterman saw was a police officer who had a dislocated shoulder and a small fracture. He was screaming and it was difficult to tell if his outbursts were pain-related, Dr. Trosterman says. “He was ranting about what had happened—appropriately ranting,” he says. “He was saying, ‘My partner was at my side and I was trying to save him, but I knew I couldn’t get him out and save myself. I just had to run or I would’ve died. I left my partner to die. I left my partner to die.’ It was horrible. He probably still feels guilty about it right now.”

Contrary to some reports, Dr. Trosterman says, Bellevue and other New York City hospitals were overwhelmed with work, if not injured patients. Much of the work following the attacks was moving inpatients to free up space for casualties. The trauma service ballooned by 40 patients. “We saw more people than we ever see,” he says, “and, literally, the same number of doctors. I was, physically, unbelievably busy. I was emotionally worried about my friend and his family, and I hadn’t had contact with anyone for 48 hours. … I was frustrated that all I kept hearing on the radio was that there were no patients. I was like, ‘You need to come visit me and see what I’m doing!’ It was nonstop and nobody was alive.”

The saddest part really was the faces. I remember a college friend of mine actually coming and looking for his girlfriend’s family member at the time, and I just remember how horrified these family members were going from hospital to hospital throughout the city looking for loved ones.

—Dahlia Rizk, DO, hospitalist program director, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York City

Dr. Trosterman cared for dozens of patients on 9/11, working into the wee hours of the night (see “The Most Interesting Patient,” below). He was told to go home at 3:30 a.m. but had to return to work at 6 a.m. He says walking out of the hospital that night was like walking through the morgue.

“Manhattan is one of the most happening places, and downtown Manhattan, it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, there’s always somebody in the street and there’s always something open,” he says. “Everything was closed, dead, silent, scary, barren. It was the most surreal thing I can ever remember in my life.”

In the midst of the chaos and confusion, loneliness and isolation replaced communication.

“Everyone was working, working, working, but no one was talking,” Dr. Trosterman says. “When I look back on that day, I feel angry, frustrated, scared, weird....While there weren’t 1,000 people [to save], those 10 or 15 lives that were saved, that were critically ill, were unbelievably important to the doctors who were taking care of them—no one knows about that.”

The Optimist

Ten years ago, Dr. Rizk was director of a three-hospitalist HM service at Beth Israel Medical Center; now the program has 26 FTE hospitalists and 15 physician assistants on staff. She was running late to grand rounds that day, coffee in hand as she passed a television and saw the first news reports of an airplane crashing into the first tower. Moments later, the hospital activated its disaster protocol, and Dr. Rizk rounded up her hospitalists.

“We very rapidly started discharging patients,” she recalls. “I actually went up to the 11th floor of our hospital and could see at that time that the second tower had been hit. It was almost like a dream, like a horrible nightmare. We could see the skyline changing when the first tower dropped. I could hear the sirens and see the smoke that was filling the air.

“We started to create triage stations outside our ED, and we had all the physicians at the hospital available. The ED was pretty chaotic in terms of the throughput. There wasn’t clear instruction; we didn’t know what was happening. ... There was a lot of debris and scratches and fractures that came through our ED.

continued below...

The MOST Interesting Patient

Although his 9/11 was chaotic, stressful, and exhausting, Dr. Trosterman didn’t perform many miracles on survivors. Even so, he does have an interesting story to tell about Port Authority officer John McLoughlin.

“He was buried under the rubble. They found him and dug him out” on Sept. 12, says Dr. Trosterman, who was the on-call intern for trauma surgery at NYU Bellevue. “He had massive crush injuries to his leg. … He was brought into the hospital and taken to the operating room.”

The surgical team saved McLoughlin’s limbs, but he slipped into a coma. Dr. Trosterman was in charge of the post-care unit in which the officer was assigned.

“I remember being yelled at by multiple trauma surgeons, telling me what to do,” he recalls. “I had to watch this guy and make sure he didn’t die overnight. That was the most traumatic patient, but he was also the most famous, celebrated man in New York City at the time.”

McLoughlin would stay in the coma for six weeks and endure 27 additional surgeries. After about six weeks of recovery and rehab, he was discharged. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited, taking pictures as he walked out of the hospital. McLoughlin’s story was portrayed in the Oliver Stone movie World Trade Center.

“His entire first night, when he was on death’s door, it was probably the only thing I actually did to save anyone during 9/11,” Dr. Trosterman says. “The only thing I really did was stay with him all night long. I did everything I could to make sure he stayed alive.

“And he did. I just paid super-close attention to him.” —JC

I remember very clearly standing outside of the ED as well, mostly greeting families who were looking for loved ones throughout the course of the day and collecting photographs that we posted on the wall for missing loved ones. And I remember these chilling feelings; there were so few people that were coming in that were in critical condition. I knew that this was not where they would find these patients.”

Beth Israel was not the Level 1 trauma center for lower Manhattan at the time; the now-shuttered St. Vincent’s Hospital was the go-to ED for mass casualty incidents. “They probably got the brunt of those patients, if there were any,” Dr. Rizk says. “I don’t know how many, but I can tell you from the hospitalist standpoint on the inpatient side, there was very little that was done.”

Most of the patients at Beth Israel were wheezing, needing eyewashes, or tending to scrapes and cuts. Dr. Rizk says many of the beds cleared for traumas sat empty. “We were ready, but so little happened in terms of activity on the inpatient side,” she says. “The saddest part really was the faces. I remember a college friend of mine actually coming and looking for his girlfriend’s family member at the time, and I just remember how horrified these family members were going from hospital to hospital throughout the city looking for loved ones.”

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11, Dr. Rizk says, a heavy feeling permeated the city. “Simple things like groceries and shops and restaurants—not that anyone felt like doing that—they just weren’t available,” she says. “Everybody was on foot trying to sort out what happened.”

Her brother-in-law, who worked in the building next to the towers, survived. Others she knew did not. An elementary school friend—a firefighter who rushed into the towers after the attacks—did not make it out. A close friend had an uncle, the head of the Brooklyn fire battalion, who lost his life, too. She attended his funeral.

The months that followed the attacks were “chilling” and “empty,” she says, as the soot covered the community and sorrow pierced those who lived and worked near ground zero.

Since then, Dr. Rizk has watched an “amazing” transformation in lower Manhattan. And it’s not just construction on the new 104-story Freedom Tower or the names of victims etched into the marble fountain walls, but the trees and momentum building for the 10-year anniversary.

“Just to see that renewed hope—it’s exciting,” she says. “I live down there now and am constantly reminded, every day, as I pass ground zero. I am amazed by how resilient the city is. The whole area is coming alive again.”

Dr. Rizk hopes to attend the 9/11 memorial service this month to honor the heroes and applaud New York’s future.

“[It’s] just a symbol of strength and hope for the future of people living together,” she says, “and to recognize that we all have the fundamental human commonality, and we really need to focus on how to move forward as a society—working together as a common goal.”

Jason Carris is editor of The Hospitalist.

Memorial Plaza Opening Highlights 9/11 Anniversary

President Obama and former President George W. Bush will participate in the 10th anniversary ceremony of the Sept. 11 attacks, which will mark the first time the names of all the people killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the field in Shanksville, Pa., will be read aloud during the ceremony. Obama, Bush, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and others will give pre-selected readings; no dignitaries will make speeches, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The memorial plaza, which features two large squares where the World Trade Center stood, is set to open on the anniversary for families and dignitaries only, and to the public the following day. The names of all of the approximately 3,000 victims are etched into the walls of the memorial.

An underground museum at the site will open in late 2012.

Eighty of the 104 stories in the office tower that will be known as One World Trade Center are expected to be complete for the anniversary. It will be the tallest building in Manhattan. An underground transit center is under construction, as are privately developed office towers in the area. —JC

They both were working the day the planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. They saw the twin towers crash to the ground, the soot and debris covering lower Manhattan, and the puzzled faces of loved ones searching for information in the EDs of their hospitals. And while the memories are vivid and the shock of the terror still resides in them, they have chosen distinctly different paths since the 9/11 attacks 10 years ago.

Born and raised in Queens, Adam Trosterman, MD, grew up looking at the World Trade Center from his apartment window, studied medicine at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Manhattan, and was the intern on call for trauma surgery at NYU Bellevue the day of the attack. Today, he works as a hospitalist in Colorado and plans to spend Sept. 11 biking in the peaceful altitudes of the Rocky Mountains.

“I will probably go for a bike ride with my wife and enjoy some fresh air,” Dr. Trosterman says. “I don’t plan anything special, but I think about [Sept. 11] and I don’t think about October 11.”

A mere 10 blocks south of NYU Bellevue, straight down First Avenue, Dahlia Rizk, DO, was the hospitalist program director at Beth Israel Medical Center and in the middle of grand rounds when she first heard about the attacks on the twin towers. She has since moved to Battery Park, just a few blocks from the construction site for the new World Trade Center, and plans to participate in the 9/11 anniversary ceremony.

“I think that the memorial, the new building, and that whole area is just coming alive again. It is a real testament to the resilience of New Yorkers. Honoring the victims and their families is just so important. It’s such an incredible thing,” Dr. Rizk says. “I’m looking forward to the remembrance and celebrating the human spirit.”

Two physicians, two hospitalists, two human beings: They look back at 9/11 in diverse yet illuminating ways. These are their stories.

The Intern

A self-described New Yorker, Dr. Trosterman remembers Sept. 11, 2001, as a “beautiful, gorgeous morning” in which the sun was high and the temperature was pleasant. He, however, was in poor spirits, as everyone at NYU Bellevue “hated to be on trauma surgery” rotation. He was 29, single, and, as he puts it, “having a very good time” living in Manhattan.

He arrived at work at 6 a.m. and went about the basic duties of every first-year resident on trauma surgery rotation, rounding with two of his colleagues on 15 patients. At about 8:30 a.m., he ran into another surgery intern who informed him there was a “big trauma coming, something to do with a plane, you might want to check it out.”

Big traumas in New York City are a regular occurrence, and after nearly three months on, he says, he was “pretty well versed in how to run the trauma service. You grow up fast.”

“Back in 2001, you grew up really fast,” he adds. “There were no work-hour regulations; I was working 115 hours per week.”

Dr. Trosterman ran to his trauma slots in the ED—they were “acting weird,” he notes—and began setting up the four trauma beds for the unknown mass-casualty incident (MCI). “It took maybe five minutes,” he says. “Then I got a call from one of my colleagues who was a neurosurgery intern. He starts describing to me what happened, and tells me to come up to the ICU.”

Bellevue’s ICU is on the 15th floor, with an unobstructed view of lower Manhattan. When he got there, Dr. Trosterman had a perfect view of the horror at the World Trade Center. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” he recalls. “There was a humongous hole in the tower. At that point, I almost started laughing to myself. Not really, of course, but … we had to mobilize a whole different system, which, of course, I was a part of. But it was no longer my typical role for trauma.”

The first patient Dr. Trosterman saw that morning was pronounced dead on arrival. Ironically, he says, the patient looked a lot like his best friend’s stepfather, who worked in the World Trade Center. “They were like parents to me,” he says. “I couldn’t get through. It wasn’t until the second day that I could make a call. I don’t think I spoke to them until Sept. 13.” (Fortunately, everyone Dr. Trosterman knew who worked in the towers survived.)

The next patient Dr. Trosterman saw was a police officer who had a dislocated shoulder and a small fracture. He was screaming and it was difficult to tell if his outbursts were pain-related, Dr. Trosterman says. “He was ranting about what had happened—appropriately ranting,” he says. “He was saying, ‘My partner was at my side and I was trying to save him, but I knew I couldn’t get him out and save myself. I just had to run or I would’ve died. I left my partner to die. I left my partner to die.’ It was horrible. He probably still feels guilty about it right now.”

Contrary to some reports, Dr. Trosterman says, Bellevue and other New York City hospitals were overwhelmed with work, if not injured patients. Much of the work following the attacks was moving inpatients to free up space for casualties. The trauma service ballooned by 40 patients. “We saw more people than we ever see,” he says, “and, literally, the same number of doctors. I was, physically, unbelievably busy. I was emotionally worried about my friend and his family, and I hadn’t had contact with anyone for 48 hours. … I was frustrated that all I kept hearing on the radio was that there were no patients. I was like, ‘You need to come visit me and see what I’m doing!’ It was nonstop and nobody was alive.”

The saddest part really was the faces. I remember a college friend of mine actually coming and looking for his girlfriend’s family member at the time, and I just remember how horrified these family members were going from hospital to hospital throughout the city looking for loved ones.

—Dahlia Rizk, DO, hospitalist program director, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York City

Dr. Trosterman cared for dozens of patients on 9/11, working into the wee hours of the night (see “The Most Interesting Patient,” below). He was told to go home at 3:30 a.m. but had to return to work at 6 a.m. He says walking out of the hospital that night was like walking through the morgue.

“Manhattan is one of the most happening places, and downtown Manhattan, it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, there’s always somebody in the street and there’s always something open,” he says. “Everything was closed, dead, silent, scary, barren. It was the most surreal thing I can ever remember in my life.”

In the midst of the chaos and confusion, loneliness and isolation replaced communication.

“Everyone was working, working, working, but no one was talking,” Dr. Trosterman says. “When I look back on that day, I feel angry, frustrated, scared, weird....While there weren’t 1,000 people [to save], those 10 or 15 lives that were saved, that were critically ill, were unbelievably important to the doctors who were taking care of them—no one knows about that.”

The Optimist

Ten years ago, Dr. Rizk was director of a three-hospitalist HM service at Beth Israel Medical Center; now the program has 26 FTE hospitalists and 15 physician assistants on staff. She was running late to grand rounds that day, coffee in hand as she passed a television and saw the first news reports of an airplane crashing into the first tower. Moments later, the hospital activated its disaster protocol, and Dr. Rizk rounded up her hospitalists.

“We very rapidly started discharging patients,” she recalls. “I actually went up to the 11th floor of our hospital and could see at that time that the second tower had been hit. It was almost like a dream, like a horrible nightmare. We could see the skyline changing when the first tower dropped. I could hear the sirens and see the smoke that was filling the air.

“We started to create triage stations outside our ED, and we had all the physicians at the hospital available. The ED was pretty chaotic in terms of the throughput. There wasn’t clear instruction; we didn’t know what was happening. ... There was a lot of debris and scratches and fractures that came through our ED.

continued below...

The MOST Interesting Patient

Although his 9/11 was chaotic, stressful, and exhausting, Dr. Trosterman didn’t perform many miracles on survivors. Even so, he does have an interesting story to tell about Port Authority officer John McLoughlin.

“He was buried under the rubble. They found him and dug him out” on Sept. 12, says Dr. Trosterman, who was the on-call intern for trauma surgery at NYU Bellevue. “He had massive crush injuries to his leg. … He was brought into the hospital and taken to the operating room.”

The surgical team saved McLoughlin’s limbs, but he slipped into a coma. Dr. Trosterman was in charge of the post-care unit in which the officer was assigned.

“I remember being yelled at by multiple trauma surgeons, telling me what to do,” he recalls. “I had to watch this guy and make sure he didn’t die overnight. That was the most traumatic patient, but he was also the most famous, celebrated man in New York City at the time.”

McLoughlin would stay in the coma for six weeks and endure 27 additional surgeries. After about six weeks of recovery and rehab, he was discharged. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited, taking pictures as he walked out of the hospital. McLoughlin’s story was portrayed in the Oliver Stone movie World Trade Center.

“His entire first night, when he was on death’s door, it was probably the only thing I actually did to save anyone during 9/11,” Dr. Trosterman says. “The only thing I really did was stay with him all night long. I did everything I could to make sure he stayed alive.

“And he did. I just paid super-close attention to him.” —JC

I remember very clearly standing outside of the ED as well, mostly greeting families who were looking for loved ones throughout the course of the day and collecting photographs that we posted on the wall for missing loved ones. And I remember these chilling feelings; there were so few people that were coming in that were in critical condition. I knew that this was not where they would find these patients.”

Beth Israel was not the Level 1 trauma center for lower Manhattan at the time; the now-shuttered St. Vincent’s Hospital was the go-to ED for mass casualty incidents. “They probably got the brunt of those patients, if there were any,” Dr. Rizk says. “I don’t know how many, but I can tell you from the hospitalist standpoint on the inpatient side, there was very little that was done.”

Most of the patients at Beth Israel were wheezing, needing eyewashes, or tending to scrapes and cuts. Dr. Rizk says many of the beds cleared for traumas sat empty. “We were ready, but so little happened in terms of activity on the inpatient side,” she says. “The saddest part really was the faces. I remember a college friend of mine actually coming and looking for his girlfriend’s family member at the time, and I just remember how horrified these family members were going from hospital to hospital throughout the city looking for loved ones.”

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11, Dr. Rizk says, a heavy feeling permeated the city. “Simple things like groceries and shops and restaurants—not that anyone felt like doing that—they just weren’t available,” she says. “Everybody was on foot trying to sort out what happened.”

Her brother-in-law, who worked in the building next to the towers, survived. Others she knew did not. An elementary school friend—a firefighter who rushed into the towers after the attacks—did not make it out. A close friend had an uncle, the head of the Brooklyn fire battalion, who lost his life, too. She attended his funeral.

The months that followed the attacks were “chilling” and “empty,” she says, as the soot covered the community and sorrow pierced those who lived and worked near ground zero.

Since then, Dr. Rizk has watched an “amazing” transformation in lower Manhattan. And it’s not just construction on the new 104-story Freedom Tower or the names of victims etched into the marble fountain walls, but the trees and momentum building for the 10-year anniversary.

“Just to see that renewed hope—it’s exciting,” she says. “I live down there now and am constantly reminded, every day, as I pass ground zero. I am amazed by how resilient the city is. The whole area is coming alive again.”

Dr. Rizk hopes to attend the 9/11 memorial service this month to honor the heroes and applaud New York’s future.

“[It’s] just a symbol of strength and hope for the future of people living together,” she says, “and to recognize that we all have the fundamental human commonality, and we really need to focus on how to move forward as a society—working together as a common goal.”

Jason Carris is editor of The Hospitalist.

Memorial Plaza Opening Highlights 9/11 Anniversary

President Obama and former President George W. Bush will participate in the 10th anniversary ceremony of the Sept. 11 attacks, which will mark the first time the names of all the people killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the field in Shanksville, Pa., will be read aloud during the ceremony. Obama, Bush, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and others will give pre-selected readings; no dignitaries will make speeches, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The memorial plaza, which features two large squares where the World Trade Center stood, is set to open on the anniversary for families and dignitaries only, and to the public the following day. The names of all of the approximately 3,000 victims are etched into the walls of the memorial.

An underground museum at the site will open in late 2012.

Eighty of the 104 stories in the office tower that will be known as One World Trade Center are expected to be complete for the anniversary. It will be the tallest building in Manhattan. An underground transit center is under construction, as are privately developed office towers in the area. —JC

Dr. Feldman

Every SHM member signs up for different reasons. For some, it’s career development. For others, it’s discounts on industry-leading resources like SHM’s annual meeting or access to quality-improvement (QI) resources like SHM’s new SQUINT (see “SQUINT Is Looking Out for You,” July 2011, p. 6).

But a common theme emerges, even among a variety of hospitalists across the country: For hospitalists, SHM is home.

HM has grown and evolved at a breakneck pace over the past 15 years, going from a few hundred hospitalists in 1996 to an estimated 30,000-plus today. The growth of a previously undefined specialty, coupled with the very public tumult and change in healthcare delivery, has made thousands of hospitalists eager for a community to call their own.

“It’s important for hospitalists to know that there’s an organization that can help and support them,” says Gopal Sarker, MD, a Springfield, Mass. -based hospitalist and chief medical officer of Accountable Care Associates in Springfield. When Sarker first became an SHM member in 2003, he signed up for the added credibility that membership brought to his new career as a hospitalist.

His new membership, he says, implied increased recognition for his own career and the specialty. “At the time, there weren’t that many hospitalists around,” he says. “We knew we needed to get more organized and involved. That’s why I got involved.”

Not every member uses every product, service, and benefit SHM offers, but many hospitalists who integrate SHM’s offerings into their professional lives have forged new career paths, formed valuable relationships, and created their own sense of personal and professional reward.

“I joined because I was a newly minted hospitalist, having just joined the group at Hopkins,” says Lenny Feldman, MD, FACP, FAAP, SFHM, the Med-Peds Urban Health Residency program director at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. “I heard that this was our society, and I wanted to be involved with the society for hospital medicine. It seemed like it was a perfect fit. I had been to other meetings, and it seemed that SHM was destined to be my home organization.”

SHM: Moving Hospitalist Careers Up

In the early days, individual hospitalists largely were responsible for making the case for the specialty and their own careers. Today, SHM membership programs help hospitalists make their case getting hired and promoted, in addition to their individual commitment and accomplishments.

Even in a hiring environment in which hospitalists are in high demand, SHM membership and involvement can help a hospitalist’s resume rise to the top of the stack.

“We’re a growing hospitalist program and I’m always impressed when I see someone that’s an SHM member,” says Erik DeLue, MD, MBA, SFHM, who, as medical director of the hospitalist program at Virtua Memorial in Mount Holly, N.J., makes hiring and promotion decisions. “That tells me that they’re serious about being a hospitalist. Especially if they’re a resident, it tells me that this is someone that is really looking at this as a career. It’s almost a deficit if they’ve been doing hospital medicine and they’re not a member.”

Dr. Feldman

To many hospitalists, career development doesn’t stop at the hospital door. SHM has provided a national platform for great ideas that improve the specialty and advance careers at the same time.

Dr. Feldman saw the need to provide more education to hospitalists involved in the comanagement of surgical patients and led the effort to create SHMConsults.com, a new online consultative and perioperative curriculum. The ability to collaborate with SHM on the project gave his concept additional reach and authority throughout the specialty.

“Clearly, having the backing of the society of our educational materials gives it that much more prominence and, hopefully, will entice more hospitalists to use it,” he says. “I’m very hopeful that it will continue to grow and be an important part of the society’s education.”

Though he joined seven years ago, Dr. Feldman still considers himself one of the new members.

“I see all the folks who have been involved with SHM much longer and am amazed by their involvement,” he adds. “It’s a testament to the agility of an organization like this that it’s not so large that newer members can still have an impact.”

Dr. DeLue, who has been a member for more than 10 years, tells the same thing to future SHM members.

“I hire hospitalists all the time and I say, ‘Look, this is the one society that reflects what you’re doing,’ ” he says, “ ‘and if you have any interest in being heard on things that you think are important, this is the place for you.’ I can’t imagine becoming a hospitalist and not becoming a member.”

Connections Improve the Specialty

As change leaders in hospitals, hospitalists thrive on information from other hospitals and the connections that transfer that information. For hospitalist Sabrena Tangri, MD, and HM executive Kim Dickinson, one of SHM’s greatest resources is the connection to other hospitalists.

Dr. Tangri, an academic hospitalist at Inova Fairfax Hospital in northern Virginia, is actively developing a new SHM chapter for the Washington, D.C., area. Even before completing residency in 2009, she had interest in the big-picture issues of patient satisfaction and providing efficient, effective care to inpatients.

In addition to building a support structure for hospitalists working near the nation’s capital, she uses SHM as a connection to relevant information in other hospitals—and to offer up her own experiences to other hospitalists throughout the country. “It’s a joint partnership between the physician and the organization,” she says.

Dickinson, chief operating officer of hospital medicine at Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Physician Services, has been an SHM member for long enough that she doesn’t remember the year she joined. What she does remember is the feeling of excitement that permeated her first annual meeting more than a decade ago: “There were a couple hundred people there in a hotel basement and I remember thinking, ‘This is something,’ ” she says.

Back then, Dickinson’s membership in SHM was equal parts credibility and commitment to the specialty. “As the society was growing, it felt like an obligation to stand beside colleagues and say, ‘This is important.’ In the beginning, it felt important to stand up and be counted,” she says.

That commitment still resonates with her today. It’s something that she has communicated to others over the years.

“I always told people, ‘If you can’t wake up excited about being the future of medicine, then you shouldn’t work here.’ It’s an absolute privilege to work in hospital medicine,” Dickinson says. “We’re at a very privileged place in history.”

Today, she uses that passion and the connections she has developed through SHM to improve HCA Physician Services and the entire specialty.

“I’ve developed friendships with others outside my organization in the field, which is good for sharing information,” she says. “There are no secrets about providing the best care. Everybody has the same version of the special sauce; sharing it doesn’t dilute it, it makes the industry better.

“Being a part of SHM and being part of hospital medicine is an opportunity to create the direction of medicine. We do that every day. You can’t be cooler that.”

Brendon Shank is associate vice president of communications for SHM.

Dr. Feldman

Every SHM member signs up for different reasons. For some, it’s career development. For others, it’s discounts on industry-leading resources like SHM’s annual meeting or access to quality-improvement (QI) resources like SHM’s new SQUINT (see “SQUINT Is Looking Out for You,” July 2011, p. 6).

But a common theme emerges, even among a variety of hospitalists across the country: For hospitalists, SHM is home.

HM has grown and evolved at a breakneck pace over the past 15 years, going from a few hundred hospitalists in 1996 to an estimated 30,000-plus today. The growth of a previously undefined specialty, coupled with the very public tumult and change in healthcare delivery, has made thousands of hospitalists eager for a community to call their own.

“It’s important for hospitalists to know that there’s an organization that can help and support them,” says Gopal Sarker, MD, a Springfield, Mass. -based hospitalist and chief medical officer of Accountable Care Associates in Springfield. When Sarker first became an SHM member in 2003, he signed up for the added credibility that membership brought to his new career as a hospitalist.

His new membership, he says, implied increased recognition for his own career and the specialty. “At the time, there weren’t that many hospitalists around,” he says. “We knew we needed to get more organized and involved. That’s why I got involved.”

Not every member uses every product, service, and benefit SHM offers, but many hospitalists who integrate SHM’s offerings into their professional lives have forged new career paths, formed valuable relationships, and created their own sense of personal and professional reward.

“I joined because I was a newly minted hospitalist, having just joined the group at Hopkins,” says Lenny Feldman, MD, FACP, FAAP, SFHM, the Med-Peds Urban Health Residency program director at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. “I heard that this was our society, and I wanted to be involved with the society for hospital medicine. It seemed like it was a perfect fit. I had been to other meetings, and it seemed that SHM was destined to be my home organization.”

SHM: Moving Hospitalist Careers Up

In the early days, individual hospitalists largely were responsible for making the case for the specialty and their own careers. Today, SHM membership programs help hospitalists make their case getting hired and promoted, in addition to their individual commitment and accomplishments.

Even in a hiring environment in which hospitalists are in high demand, SHM membership and involvement can help a hospitalist’s resume rise to the top of the stack.

“We’re a growing hospitalist program and I’m always impressed when I see someone that’s an SHM member,” says Erik DeLue, MD, MBA, SFHM, who, as medical director of the hospitalist program at Virtua Memorial in Mount Holly, N.J., makes hiring and promotion decisions. “That tells me that they’re serious about being a hospitalist. Especially if they’re a resident, it tells me that this is someone that is really looking at this as a career. It’s almost a deficit if they’ve been doing hospital medicine and they’re not a member.”

Dr. Feldman

To many hospitalists, career development doesn’t stop at the hospital door. SHM has provided a national platform for great ideas that improve the specialty and advance careers at the same time.

Dr. Feldman saw the need to provide more education to hospitalists involved in the comanagement of surgical patients and led the effort to create SHMConsults.com, a new online consultative and perioperative curriculum. The ability to collaborate with SHM on the project gave his concept additional reach and authority throughout the specialty.

“Clearly, having the backing of the society of our educational materials gives it that much more prominence and, hopefully, will entice more hospitalists to use it,” he says. “I’m very hopeful that it will continue to grow and be an important part of the society’s education.”

Though he joined seven years ago, Dr. Feldman still considers himself one of the new members.

“I see all the folks who have been involved with SHM much longer and am amazed by their involvement,” he adds. “It’s a testament to the agility of an organization like this that it’s not so large that newer members can still have an impact.”

Dr. DeLue, who has been a member for more than 10 years, tells the same thing to future SHM members.

“I hire hospitalists all the time and I say, ‘Look, this is the one society that reflects what you’re doing,’ ” he says, “ ‘and if you have any interest in being heard on things that you think are important, this is the place for you.’ I can’t imagine becoming a hospitalist and not becoming a member.”

Connections Improve the Specialty

As change leaders in hospitals, hospitalists thrive on information from other hospitals and the connections that transfer that information. For hospitalist Sabrena Tangri, MD, and HM executive Kim Dickinson, one of SHM’s greatest resources is the connection to other hospitalists.

Dr. Tangri, an academic hospitalist at Inova Fairfax Hospital in northern Virginia, is actively developing a new SHM chapter for the Washington, D.C., area. Even before completing residency in 2009, she had interest in the big-picture issues of patient satisfaction and providing efficient, effective care to inpatients.

In addition to building a support structure for hospitalists working near the nation’s capital, she uses SHM as a connection to relevant information in other hospitals—and to offer up her own experiences to other hospitalists throughout the country. “It’s a joint partnership between the physician and the organization,” she says.

Dickinson, chief operating officer of hospital medicine at Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Physician Services, has been an SHM member for long enough that she doesn’t remember the year she joined. What she does remember is the feeling of excitement that permeated her first annual meeting more than a decade ago: “There were a couple hundred people there in a hotel basement and I remember thinking, ‘This is something,’ ” she says.

Back then, Dickinson’s membership in SHM was equal parts credibility and commitment to the specialty. “As the society was growing, it felt like an obligation to stand beside colleagues and say, ‘This is important.’ In the beginning, it felt important to stand up and be counted,” she says.

That commitment still resonates with her today. It’s something that she has communicated to others over the years.

“I always told people, ‘If you can’t wake up excited about being the future of medicine, then you shouldn’t work here.’ It’s an absolute privilege to work in hospital medicine,” Dickinson says. “We’re at a very privileged place in history.”

Today, she uses that passion and the connections she has developed through SHM to improve HCA Physician Services and the entire specialty.

“I’ve developed friendships with others outside my organization in the field, which is good for sharing information,” she says. “There are no secrets about providing the best care. Everybody has the same version of the special sauce; sharing it doesn’t dilute it, it makes the industry better.

“Being a part of SHM and being part of hospital medicine is an opportunity to create the direction of medicine. We do that every day. You can’t be cooler that.”

Brendon Shank is associate vice president of communications for SHM.

Dr. Feldman

Every SHM member signs up for different reasons. For some, it’s career development. For others, it’s discounts on industry-leading resources like SHM’s annual meeting or access to quality-improvement (QI) resources like SHM’s new SQUINT (see “SQUINT Is Looking Out for You,” July 2011, p. 6).

But a common theme emerges, even among a variety of hospitalists across the country: For hospitalists, SHM is home.

HM has grown and evolved at a breakneck pace over the past 15 years, going from a few hundred hospitalists in 1996 to an estimated 30,000-plus today. The growth of a previously undefined specialty, coupled with the very public tumult and change in healthcare delivery, has made thousands of hospitalists eager for a community to call their own.

“It’s important for hospitalists to know that there’s an organization that can help and support them,” says Gopal Sarker, MD, a Springfield, Mass. -based hospitalist and chief medical officer of Accountable Care Associates in Springfield. When Sarker first became an SHM member in 2003, he signed up for the added credibility that membership brought to his new career as a hospitalist.

His new membership, he says, implied increased recognition for his own career and the specialty. “At the time, there weren’t that many hospitalists around,” he says. “We knew we needed to get more organized and involved. That’s why I got involved.”

Not every member uses every product, service, and benefit SHM offers, but many hospitalists who integrate SHM’s offerings into their professional lives have forged new career paths, formed valuable relationships, and created their own sense of personal and professional reward.

“I joined because I was a newly minted hospitalist, having just joined the group at Hopkins,” says Lenny Feldman, MD, FACP, FAAP, SFHM, the Med-Peds Urban Health Residency program director at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. “I heard that this was our society, and I wanted to be involved with the society for hospital medicine. It seemed like it was a perfect fit. I had been to other meetings, and it seemed that SHM was destined to be my home organization.”

SHM: Moving Hospitalist Careers Up

In the early days, individual hospitalists largely were responsible for making the case for the specialty and their own careers. Today, SHM membership programs help hospitalists make their case getting hired and promoted, in addition to their individual commitment and accomplishments.

Even in a hiring environment in which hospitalists are in high demand, SHM membership and involvement can help a hospitalist’s resume rise to the top of the stack.

“We’re a growing hospitalist program and I’m always impressed when I see someone that’s an SHM member,” says Erik DeLue, MD, MBA, SFHM, who, as medical director of the hospitalist program at Virtua Memorial in Mount Holly, N.J., makes hiring and promotion decisions. “That tells me that they’re serious about being a hospitalist. Especially if they’re a resident, it tells me that this is someone that is really looking at this as a career. It’s almost a deficit if they’ve been doing hospital medicine and they’re not a member.”

Dr. Feldman

To many hospitalists, career development doesn’t stop at the hospital door. SHM has provided a national platform for great ideas that improve the specialty and advance careers at the same time.

Dr. Feldman saw the need to provide more education to hospitalists involved in the comanagement of surgical patients and led the effort to create SHMConsults.com, a new online consultative and perioperative curriculum. The ability to collaborate with SHM on the project gave his concept additional reach and authority throughout the specialty.

“Clearly, having the backing of the society of our educational materials gives it that much more prominence and, hopefully, will entice more hospitalists to use it,” he says. “I’m very hopeful that it will continue to grow and be an important part of the society’s education.”

Though he joined seven years ago, Dr. Feldman still considers himself one of the new members.

“I see all the folks who have been involved with SHM much longer and am amazed by their involvement,” he adds. “It’s a testament to the agility of an organization like this that it’s not so large that newer members can still have an impact.”

Dr. DeLue, who has been a member for more than 10 years, tells the same thing to future SHM members.

“I hire hospitalists all the time and I say, ‘Look, this is the one society that reflects what you’re doing,’ ” he says, “ ‘and if you have any interest in being heard on things that you think are important, this is the place for you.’ I can’t imagine becoming a hospitalist and not becoming a member.”

Connections Improve the Specialty

As change leaders in hospitals, hospitalists thrive on information from other hospitals and the connections that transfer that information. For hospitalist Sabrena Tangri, MD, and HM executive Kim Dickinson, one of SHM’s greatest resources is the connection to other hospitalists.

Dr. Tangri, an academic hospitalist at Inova Fairfax Hospital in northern Virginia, is actively developing a new SHM chapter for the Washington, D.C., area. Even before completing residency in 2009, she had interest in the big-picture issues of patient satisfaction and providing efficient, effective care to inpatients.

In addition to building a support structure for hospitalists working near the nation’s capital, she uses SHM as a connection to relevant information in other hospitals—and to offer up her own experiences to other hospitalists throughout the country. “It’s a joint partnership between the physician and the organization,” she says.

Dickinson, chief operating officer of hospital medicine at Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Physician Services, has been an SHM member for long enough that she doesn’t remember the year she joined. What she does remember is the feeling of excitement that permeated her first annual meeting more than a decade ago: “There were a couple hundred people there in a hotel basement and I remember thinking, ‘This is something,’ ” she says.

Back then, Dickinson’s membership in SHM was equal parts credibility and commitment to the specialty. “As the society was growing, it felt like an obligation to stand beside colleagues and say, ‘This is important.’ In the beginning, it felt important to stand up and be counted,” she says.

That commitment still resonates with her today. It’s something that she has communicated to others over the years.

“I always told people, ‘If you can’t wake up excited about being the future of medicine, then you shouldn’t work here.’ It’s an absolute privilege to work in hospital medicine,” Dickinson says. “We’re at a very privileged place in history.”

Today, she uses that passion and the connections she has developed through SHM to improve HCA Physician Services and the entire specialty.

“I’ve developed friendships with others outside my organization in the field, which is good for sharing information,” she says. “There are no secrets about providing the best care. Everybody has the same version of the special sauce; sharing it doesn’t dilute it, it makes the industry better.

“Being a part of SHM and being part of hospital medicine is an opportunity to create the direction of medicine. We do that every day. You can’t be cooler that.”

Brendon Shank is associate vice president of communications for SHM.