UPMC Shadyside Department of Medicine updates physician leadership on recent activities

The following report is based on a presentation to the UPMC Shadyside Medical Executive Committee by Fred Rubin, MD, chief, Division of Medicine, UPMC Shadyside.

The Department of Medicine continues to grow and address various regulatory challenges while expanding opportunities for physician education and ensuring that the next generation of physicians is prepared to provide exemplary patient care.

There are 590 physicians in the department (120 of them are new this year) and 145 other health care professionals, such as physician assistants and speech and language pathologists. The largest divisions are General Internal Medicine, Cardiology, and Hematology/Oncology.

Recent developments within the department’s Graduate Medical Education (GME) program include:

  • Fourteen of the 18 interns are U.S. medical school graduates. There are more than 150 USMG applicants for next year. The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) pass rate remains at 100 percent.
  • Dario Torre, MD, has resigned as director, Internal Medicine Categorical Residency Program, and relocated to Drexel University. A new program director has been identified and is expected to start at UPMC Shadyside in August 2012. Michael Elnicki, MD, is serving as interim director.
  • Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) standards that reassessed resident supervision and duty hours took effect in July. For example, an intern may not work more than 16 hours in a row. A resident may not work more than 24 hours of continuous duty, with four additional hours permitted for administrative work. An intern may not admit more than six patients in 48 hours nor follow more than 10 patients at a time (discharging a patient during the day does not create a new slot). ACGME standards in these and related areas are expected to become more restrictive in the future.
  • Continuing medical education (CME) events are a department priority. CME activities include weekly grand rounds, as well as quarterly morbidity and mortality conferences and autopsy rounds. The ninth annual Cooper Lecture was held in November. The first Sachs Lecture, named in recognition of Murray Sachs, MD, was held in April with Steven Shapiro, MD, senior vice president, and chief medical and scientific officer, UPMC, as presenter.
  • The department’s nonteaching service was established in 2003 in response to the first major ACGME-mandated restrictions on resident work hours. The service, which covers Medicine, Surgery, and Family Medicine, initially admitted 300 patients a month. It now admits 1,000 patients a month and handles 1,500 calls a month from Nursing units.
  • The hospitalist service, known as “The Crimson Team,” was created by the department in 2010 to manage overnight observation patients. It expanded to a full service in July in response to further ACGME restrictions. The Crimson Team mostly admits unassigned Emergency Department patients. Its average daily census is approximately 15 patients.