As the first editor-in-chief of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Dr. Mark V. Williams has been helping to shape the first draft of the history of this new field.
In that role, he has watched hospital medicine grow and mature. The peer-reviewed journal, which was launched in January 2006, was once home to articles aimed at proving the value of adding hospitalists to an institution’s roster. But now most articles focus on how to optimize care within the hospitalist model and how to more efficiently manage the hospital itself.
Dr. Mark V. Williams
“We have actually rejected articles in the recent past that were descriptions of the implementation of a hospitalist program,” Dr. Williams said. “That’s already been done.”
Dr. Williams, who currently serves as chief of the division of hospital medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, is a former president of the Society of Hospital Medicine and in 1998 established the first hospitalist program at a public hospital at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.
Despite his credentials, Dr. Williams said he was a little anxious about accepting the job as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Hospital Medicine back in 2005. Having never served as an editor of a journal, he didn’t know what to expect. But his training in evidence-based medicine and the team of editors assembled by the Society of Hospital Medicine have made the job a lot of fun, he said.
The job has not been without challenges, he said, but not always the ones he was expecting. Going into the position with a newly launched journal in a new field, Dr. Williams said he was expecting to have trouble finding high-quality research articles to fill all the pages. It turned out that his biggest challenge has been sorting through the large volume of submissions and having to reject interesting articles. Dr. Williams and the rest of the staff have tried to address this by publishing more articles online, and in the future they hope to expand both the number of issues of the journal and the number of pages in each issue.
The volume of submissions shows that hospital medicine is maturing as a field, he said.
“There has never been a journal focused on care delivery in the hospital, and yet this is where one-third of federal health care funding is expended,” he said. “I think it was a natural.”
The volume of high-quality research being conducted by hospitalists is only likely to grow, Dr. Williams said, as academic institutions begin establishing divisions of hospital medicine and devoting research dollars to this area. For example, the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he works, has just hired four hospitalists who will devote the majority of their time to research on hospital medicine. Additionally, many other physicians at the institution are involved in smaller research projects.
“It’s this investment in hospital medicine research that’s going to grow the entire field long term, demonstrating the importance of hospitalists in improving care delivery and quality improvement at hospitals,” Dr. Williams said.
As for the journal, Dr. Williams sees his next big task as helping to prepare to hand over the reins to the next editor. He also wants to stabilize the size and frequency of the journal, and hopes to see it become a monthly publication sometime in the next 2 years. But he’s pleased with the journal’s progress so far. For instance, the journal was listed in Medline, the National Library of Medicine’s bibliographic medical database, in its first year. And a recent measurement of the journal’s “impact factor,” or how often it is cited by other journals, also showed that it is gaining credibility within the larger research community.
“I’ve been surprised that we’ve achieved everything that we set out to do so fast,” Dr. Williams said.