Vineet Chopra honored with a Society of Hospital Medicine Award of Excellence

Vineet Chopra, M.D., M.Sc., F.H.M., assistant professor of medicine, University of Michigan Medical School, honored for exemplary contributions to hospital medicine and dedication to improving patient care

The Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) recently named the winners of its 2016 Awards of Excellence, SHM’s highest award that honors best practices in hospital medicine in areas including quality improvement, research, teaching and teamwork. SHM celebrated the winners at the Hospital Medicine 2016 meeting in San Diego, California on March 8.

Among the winners is Vineet Chopra, M.D., M.Sc., FHM, an assistant professor of in the Division of General Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School’s Department of Internal Medicine, and Research Scientist in the Patient Safety Enhancement Program and Center for Clinical Management Research at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. He won the Award for Excellence in Research.

Chopra’s research efforts are centered on improving the safety of hospitalized patients by preventing hospital-acquired complications. Using peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs) as a model for this research, his work has focused on quantifying current use of PICCs in hospitalized patients, estimating the risk of complications and defining innovative ways to improve decision-making for these devices. He leads a team that recently launched http://www.improvepicc.com/ as a central point of information for clinicians about PICC use, and offers free access to the Michigan Appropriateness Guide for Intravenous Catheters, also known as the MAGIC guide.

Following several years as the medical director of a hospitalist program in a community hospital, he was recruited to the University of Michigan in 2008. In 2010, he became the first hospital medicine research fellow at U-M and received two years of dedicated training in health services research and health policy. In 2012 he joined the Medical School faculty as an investigator in hospital medicine.

Chopra has received external research funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institute on Aging, the Blue Cross Blue Shield  of Michigan Foundation, the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research and the Veterans Health Administration through the National Center for Patient Safety. He has been the recipient of several research awards, including the 2013 Society of Hospital Medicine Young Researcher Award.

“I am humbled to be the recipient of the 2016 SHM Excellence in Research Award,” Chopra says. “The list of prior awardees reflects many of the giants of research in hospital medicine, including my mentor, Dr. Sanjay Saint. I am delighted that two Wolverines now populate this distinguished list.”

Chopra has published 90 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals and is an associate editor at the American Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Hospital Medicine. He is also proud to serve as chair for SHMs Research Committee. He is a member of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.

For more information about SHM’s Awards of Excellence, visit www.hospitalmedicine.org/awards. 

ABOUT SHM

Representing the fastest growing specialty in modern healthcare, the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) is the leading medical society for more than 52,000 hospitalists and their patients. SHM is dedicated to promoting the highest quality care for all hospitalized patients and overall excellence in the practice of hospital medicine through quality improvement, education, advocacy and research. Over the past decade, studies have shown that hospitalists can contribute to decreased patient lengths of stay, reductions in hospital costs and readmission rates, and increased patient satisfaction.

For more information about SHM and hospital medicine, visit www.hospitalmedicine.org and follow SHM on Twitter @SHMLive.