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The field of hospital medicine is growing rapidly in academic medical centers. However, few organizations have explicitly considered the opportunities and barriers posed to hospital medicine’s development as an academic field in internal medicine.To develop consensus around key areas limiting or facilitating hospital medicine’s development as an academic discipline.Consensus format conference of key stakeholders in academic hospital medicine.The Consensus Group identified several issues impeding the development of academic hospital medicine as a recognized entity in academic settings, including extraordinarily rapid growth, increasingly preponderate non-teaching roles, and demands to perform non-clinical duties (such as quality improvement) not generally viewed as academic pursuits. The Consensus Group developed recommendations for addressing these concerns, specifically 1) characterizing the ‘optimal’ job description for an academic hospitalist, 2) developing better local and at-a-distance opportunities for training academic hospitalists in key aspects of early career success, 3) advocacy for development of fellows and junior faculty researchers in hospital medicine.Fostering academic hospital medicine will help address these issues more effectively and will help the field while also attracting the next generation of generalists needed to care for an increasingly complex inpatient population.

Research has revealed significant variation in both the quality of clinical care and the health status of populations. We conducted a study to determine if variations in the quality of clinical care can be quantitatively linked to variations in health status, at the patient and the population level. This study, conducted at health facilities in four municipalities in Macedonia, collected cross-sectional data on (1) structural measures (such as infrastructure, facilities, equipment and costs) and the quality of clinical care provided by physicians (as measured by clinical vignettes): (2) detailed health and socioeconomic status information on patients using the facilities: and (3) nearly the same information on a random sample of adults in each municipality. Data were collected from a total of 57 facilities, 273 physicians, 1451 patients, and 1627 adults from the general population. The main outcome measure was health status, based on self-reported health surveys. Objective health measures were obtained to control for preexisting conditions. The main explanatory variable was quality of clinical care, based on physicians' clinical vignette scores. Structural measures were included in our model but had a more distal relationship to health status. We found that quality of care strongly predicted sell-reported health status of patients using the facilities even after controlling for other factors (p < .05). Quality of care was also associated with higher health status for the population living in the surrounding community, regardless of utilization (p < .05). This linkage between quality of clinical care and health suggests that policies that improve clinical practice have the potential to improve population health more rapidly than other interventions. Keywords: Quality of care; Health outcomes; International health services; Population health status; Cross-national comparative research