PHILADELPHIA, May 3 /PRNewswire/ -- The Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) has elected new officers and board members for 2004, formally inducting them at its annual meeting held April 20-22 in New Orleans, Louisiana. New officers include: Jeanne Huddleston, M.D., president; Steven Pantilat, M.D., president-elect; Russell Holman, treasurer; and William Atchley, M.D., FACP, who returns for a second term as secretary. In addition, new board members Patrick Cawley, M.D., FACP, and Mitchell Jay Wilson, M.D., were installed.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20030401/LATU042LOGO )
“We’re thrilled to have such a dynamic group of hospital medicine innovators on our 2004 board of directors and leadership team,” said Jeff Dichter, M.D., SHM’s immediate past-president. “They have all consistently demonstrated their commitment to hospital medicine and have helped expand the scope of the hospitalist movement and advance the goals of our society.”
Incoming President Dr. Huddleston will focus the organization and its members on the role hospitalists play in improving quality of medical care at their hospitals. “Improving quality of care continues to be a key issue in the national spotlight, and hospitalists sit squarely on the front line in shaping that discussion and the methodologies for improving care,” Huddleston said. “SHM will be looking to partner this year with other national organizations in the effort to bring even more attention to this issue. I look forward to leading SHM in that arena.”
Dr. Huddleston, a charter member of SHM since 1997, is the director of the Inpatient Internal Medicine Program at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, and is an assistant professor of medicine at the Mayo Medical School. She is also program director of the inpatient internal medicine fellowship and on the faculty of the department of health care policy and research, department of health sciences research and the master’s degree faculty, Mayo Graduate School of Medicine. A graduate of Michigan State University, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1990 and a degree in medicine in 1993.
President-Elect Steve Pantilat, M.D., is associate professor of clinical medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a hospitalist attending on the medical service and is the founding director of both the Palliative Care Consult Service and the Comfort Care Suites, a 2-bed inpatient palliative care unit at UCSF. Dr. Pantilat also is a full-time faculty member in the Program in Medical Ethics at UCSF, a faculty scholar of the Soros Foundation Project on Death in America and a recipient of a “Research Career Development” award from the National Institute on Aging. Dr. Pantilat is also the director of the UCSF Palliative Care Leadership Center, which trains teams from hospitals across the country to develop and implement palliative care services in their own institutions. In addition to his research on improving palliative care, Dr. Pantilat teaches palliative care at UCSF and is co-editor of an end-of-life care series in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Another SHM charter member, Secretary William Atchley, Jr., M.D., FACP, of Norfolk, Virginia, has been a practicing hospitalist since 1995, when he founded the hospitalist practice for Sentara Medical Group. The program grew to provide coverage to three local hospitals. He also helped to create the Division of Hospital Medicine in Sentara Medical Group. In 2002 he left Sentara Medical Group to start the hospitalist service at Sentara Careplex Hospital in Hampton, Virginia. At that time he founded Peninsula Inpatient Medicine Specialists, which now has eight hospitalists. He currently is the director of the hospitalist service at Sentara Careplex Hospital. A 1983 graduate of Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Dr. Atchley completed his internal medicine residency at State University of New York Upstate Medical Center in 1986.
New Treasurer Russell Holman, M.D., is associate medical director for hospital services at HealthPartners Medical Group & Clinics in Minnesota and is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Since starting the HPMG&C hospitalist program in 1997, he has expanded it to 30 physicians across four hospital sites, now responsible for 80 percent of the inpatient care for its 240,000 members. Dr. Holman also founded and serves as the director for the HealthPartners Fellowship Program in hospital medicine. Working with the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement and other HPMG&C leaders, Dr. Holman provided support that helped guide HealthPartners’ selection as a finalist in the “Pursuing Perfection Initiative,” a joint project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Dr. Holman received his M.D. degree from Washington University and became chief resident in internal medicine at the University of Minnesota. He won the University of Minnesota Department of Medicine’s “Teacher of the Year” award in 1997 and was the recipient of the SHM award for “Outstanding Service in Hospital Medicine” in 2002.
New board member Patrick Cawley was a charter member of SHM, joining in 1997. Dr. Cawley is director of hospitalist services at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. There he also serves as assistant professor, division of internal medicine; and medical director, short stay unit. He is also the chief consultant of U.S. Hospitalists, a medical Group in Charleston. Dr. Cawley received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1988 from the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and his M.D. degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. He is currently working on his MBA.
New board member Mitchell Jay Wilson, M.D., is associate professor of medicine in the department of internal medicine at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. He also is the director of the department of medicine hospitalist services, director of the division of general medicine hospital services, and medical director of Firsthealth of the Carolinas Hospitalist Services. Dr. Wilson earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin and received his M.D. degree from The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1993.
The Society of Hospital Medicine is the premier U.S. medical society representing hospitalists -- physicians whose primary professional focus is the general medical care of hospitalized patients. Currently there are approximately 8,000 hospitalists nationwide with the number expected to grow to about 20,000 by the end of the decade. Hospitalist activities include patient care, research, teaching and leadership related to hospital care. For more information, visit SHM at http://www.hospitalmedicine.com/.
Photo: Newscom:http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20030401/LATU042LOGOAP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org/PRN Photo Desk, photodesk@prnewswire.comSociety of Hospital Medicine
CONTACT: Lisa Freeman or Ross Goldberg, both of Kevin/Ross PublicRelations, +1-818-597-8453
Web site: http://www.hospitalmedicine.com/
