Hospitalists launch an online publication about inpatient care.
Telehealth during COVID-19, mpox, bedside rounding—these are just some of the topics that have been covered so far in Brown Hospital Medicine, a peer-reviewed research journal on the care of inpatients that was founded last year by three Brown physicians.
By creating a new, accessible journal, the founders hoped to stimulate research in this area and provide another outlet for clinicians and researchers across career stages to submit work having clinical value for hospitalists, explain Assistant Professors of Medicine Vijay Selvaraj, MD, MPH, and Arkadiy Finn, MD, the senior founding editors along with Professor of Medicine Kwame Dapaah-Afriyie, MD.
Only two other US journals, the Journal of Hospital Medicine and the American Journal of Hospital Medicine, are dedicated to the field, and many hospitalists don’t have any published articles, says Selvaraj, the new journal’s editor-in-chief. Finn found this to be especially concerning during the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of inpatients.
Brown Hospital Medicine principally highlights findings relevant to everyday patient care, instead of a higher-level focus on research, institutions, and policies, Finn and Selvaraj say. The journal includes case reports, reviews, clinical research, medical imaging, and quality improvement studies from authors from a variety of health care roles and stages of training in the US and abroad, Selvaraj says.
“It’s pretty cool to be reading about a case that clinicians saw in Honduras, in Ireland. It’s very interesting—it’s kind of thrilling, actually—to see what they’re seeing and compare and then to be able to give them the ability to publish it,” Finn says. The journal publishes quarterly online and is supported by Brown’s Department of Medicine.
Articles are available on Google Scholar and the Directory of Open Access Journals, so anyone may view the journal’s publications. The founders are striving to also be indexed in PubMED Central, for which they need to meet a set of criteria, Selvaraj says; this would increase the searchability and dissemination of the published work.
Selvaraj hopes the journal will help physicians “be updated on new information, get answers to questions [they’re] looking for, or just have the pleasure of reading some interesting cases or getting some quick words of wisdom.”
