Quality and Safety
Our Hospitalists have been engaged in numerous institutional quality improvement and safety initiatives. Recent successful projects include significantly reducing the number of unnecessary labs performed on our inpatients, reducing the time to admission orders for patients being admitted though the Emergency Department and improvement in completion of accurate problem lists at the time of discharge. In addition, we have developed or modified order sets to improve the quality and consistency of care.
Education
Our faculty teaches general internal medicine and hospital medicine to medical students, resident physicians, professional colleagues, and community members.
Hospitalists serve as teaching attendings for the 4 General Medicine teaching teams throughout the year – offering clinical supervision, bedside education, lectures, and evaluation to resident physicians and medical students. Additionally, our inpatient faculty physicians lead the Medicine Consult elective for residents and medical students, including residents from Orthopedic Surgery.
Dr. Tara Scribner is an Internal Medicine Residency Assistant Program Director. Our faculty are regular participants and facilitators at Resident Noon Report and Intern Report. Drs. Caleb Burr and Preetika Muthukrishnan direct the resident mock code curriculum. Dr. Jason Bartch is the Internal Medicine Clerkship Director, and Dr. Lee-Anna Burgess is the Director for the Internal Medicine Acting Internship and the Course Director for the Nutrition, Metabolism, and GI Course. Several faculty facilitate small group problem-based learning sessions with the LCOM medical students.
We educate our colleagues locally, regionally and nationally in a variety of venues. This includes the University of Vermont Hospital Medicine CME Conference with a national audience and faculty largely from the Division of Hospital Medicine along with numerous divisions of the Department of Medicine.
The Hospitalist Division faculty are also very involved in mentorship and advising. This includes advising numerous medical students on career choice and residency match issues. Residents also frequently seek out our hospitalists to serve as advisors, especially those going into the growing field of Hospital Medicine.
Research
In addition to our clinical work and focus on quality and safety, our faculty is engaged in diverse scholarly activities. This includes externally funded clinical trials of immunizations and high value laboratory ordering practices. Internal funding supports work in quality, communication, management of patients with opioid use disorder, and VTE prevention in acute medically ill patients.