In This Month's Issue
While strengthening a team can take on a variety of meanings, it is apt in the demanding and dynamic clinical and educational settings of multidisciplinary general internal medicine healthcare professionals.
From an individual’s perspective, strengthening the care team might mean bringing a unique expertise to their team. Orozco, et al., explore these issues and the potential for a community health worker or patient navigator to facilitate care coordination and community engagement in individual patients’ health. Myong and Newman offer a medical student perspective on the visible value of multidisciplinary team care in patients’ communities. For a team looking to adapt to changing healthcare environments and optimize the applications of their team members’ skills, Sakumoto, et al., offer a look into an all-virtual primary care team model.
General internal medicine physicians, or generalists, can identify with a variety of roles based on their clinical setting: hospitalists in hospital settings, ambulists in ambulatory settings, and now virtualists in virtual or remote settings. For leaders and organizations looking to bring on talent from diverse professional and personal backgrounds, strategic planning and intentionality are needed to foster innovation and synergy within and between care teams across different settings. Alkhaiw and Torres-Deas explore the long view of primary care physicians in interdisciplinary team leadership roles.
SGIM also has its role to play throughout each of these settings with regards to promoting interdisciplinary collaboration and team-based care. Lypson, SGIM President, provides an update on behalf of SGIM Council and highlights from the winter leadership retreat. If you are a current or recent general internal medicine fellow, or a general internal medicine fellowship program director, please read an important call for survey responses from the SGIM Fellows Survey Sub-Committee, a subcommittee of the SGIM Research Committee, by Marathur, et al. The survey provides the Sub-Committee with information on the career outcomes of current and former general medicine research fellows and helps to identify barriers and facilitators to developing and maintaining a GIM research career. Also, Bass, SGIM CEO, and O’Malley, Director of the National Center for Excellence in Primary Care Research (NCEPCR), provide an update on NCEPCR goals for primary care researchers and how SGIM is engaged in advancing primary care research workforce development.
