Timing is everything, and SHM’s 13th annual conference—April 8-11 in Washington, D.C.—is happening at just the right time.

“It’s pretty exciting that we’re coming to Washington this year with all the activity in healthcare reform,” says Larry Wellikson, MD, FHM, CEO of SHM.

SHM officials say HM10, at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Md., just minutes outside the nation’s capital, is on track to be the best-attended meeting in the group’s history, a tough task given that HM09 in Chicago sold out to the tune of more than 2,000 hospitalists. HM10 will introduce new features for attendees: added pre-courses, the induction of the first classes of Senior Fellows in Hospital Medicine and Master Fellows in Hospital Medicine, an expanded research and innovation platform, and a series of more than 90 educational sessions, including a new focus on limited-seating workshops.

“For the first time since we have been having an annual meeting, we will actually have what we call workshops that were actually peer-reviewed and selected as part of a competitive process,” says Amir Jaffer, MD, FHM, chair of SHM’s annual meeting committee and division chief of hospital medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “We had a competitive submission process for these workshops. We had over 90 submissions and we selected approximately 25 workshops to be presented.”

Paul Levy, president and CEO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, will deliver HM10’s keynote address at 9 a.m. Friday, April 9. Levy has a national reputation as a quality-improvement (QI) and patient-safety innovator, and has titled his presentation “The Hospitalist’s Role in the Hospital of the Future.”

“It's a classic discussion on how you do process improvement,” Levy explains in an in-depth Q&A on p. 6. “How do you standardize care? Once you standardize care ... how do you measure that? Hospitalists are in an excellent position to do that because they work on all of the different floors of their hospitals.”

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Robert Wachter, MD, FHM, chief of the hospitalist division, professor, and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, former SHM president and author of the blog Wachter’s World (www.wachtersworld.com), will address the group—as has become custom—at noon Sunday. His focus will be “How Healthcare Reform Changes the Hospitalist Field … And Vice Versa.”

Attendees are encouraged to meet visiting professor Mark Zeidel, MD, chair of the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel. Dr. Zeidel will be a featured part of the Best of the Research, Innovations, and Clinical Vignettes (RIV) presentations. He will lead rounds during the poster sessions.

SHM officials say the speakers, educational opportunities, and new offerings continue to draw larger and larger crowds, despite the financial straits many HM groups face today.

“Even though there are travel budget cuts and education budget cuts, the one meeting that hospitalists continue to go to is SHM’s annual conference,” says Geri Barnes, SHM senior director of education and meetings. “That’s where they get their education, and, probably almost as importantly, is the networking aspect.”

Richard Quinn is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.

PHOTO MATT FENSTERMACHER

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