Academic General Internal Medicine: A Mission for the Future

Abstract

After five decades of growth that has included advances in medical education and health care delivery, value cohesion, and integration of diversity, we propose an overarching mission for academic general internal medicine to lead excellence, change, and innovation in clinical care, education, and research. General internal medicine aims to achieve health care delivery that is comprehensive, technologically advanced and individualized; instills trust within a culture of respect; is efficient in the use of time, people, and resources; is organized and financed to achieve optimal health outcomes; maximizes equity; and continually learns and adapts. This mission of health care transformation has implications for the clinical, educational, and research activities of divisions of general internal medicine over the next several decades.

Publication Rates of Abstracts Presented at the Society of General Internal Medicine Annual Meeting

“…Academic general internal medicine is a relatively new field that has grown substantially over the last several decades. 5 General internist researchers tend to investigate broad medical areas that do not fit neatly into other medical subspecialties, or topics that span many subspecialties, such as patient-physician communication, end-of-life care, medical ethics, health care delivery, health economics, and chronic disease management. 6 Academic internists have participated in the foundation of research in evidence-based medicine, patientphysician communication, and health outcomes.…”

What is the role of general internists in the tertiary or academic setting?

“…It has many interfaces with modern health care and training systems: chronic disease management, preventive medicine, integrated care, patient-centred care, e-health, health literacy, quality based performance systems, focused areas of care such as acute medicine and hospital medicine, new generation scientific research, competency based residency training and systems based practice. Academic general internal medicine offers an opportunity to transform healthcare delivery as well as undergraduate and postgraduate medical education within the new framework over the coming decades [24].…”

Perception of barriers to research among internal medicine physician hospitalists by career stage

“…24 In comparison, academic general internal medicine was founded in the 1970s (hospital medicine emerged in the mid-1990s) and by 2010, there were over 150 general internal medicine divisions, with better research training programs. 25 Hospital internal medicine will require a concerted, nationwide effort to develop rigorous, structured programs to develop the next generation of hospitalist investigators. 2 In our study, hospitalists were interested in acquiring research skills, but we did not ask if they would accept a lower salary to reduce patient care duties and acquire research skills, as is typical of research intensive programs.…”