Sean E. Greenhalgh, MD, FACP, FHM
Academic Hospitalist, Division Chief, and Regional Medical Director of Hospital Medicine at Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL
1. What is your current professional position?
Academic Hospitalist, Division Chief, and Regional Medical Director of Hospital Medicine at Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL.
2. Why did you choose internal medicine?
I like mysteries and solving puzzles. As a hospitalist, meeting a patient and their chief symptom, gathering a history and ancillary data, and making a diagnosis are very satisfying to me. When my kids ask me to describe my day, I tell them I’m basically Batman or Sherlock Holmes but with a stethoscope!
3. What trends are you seeing in your day-to-day practice (with patients, the health care system, or otherwise)?
The health care system has steadily increased in complexity while the resources available to patients and physicians to manage that complexity have dwindled. Because of that, physicians spend much more of their time dealing with “ancillary” issues—insurance denials and appeals, clinical documentation, billing and coding, utilization review, and the like. To an outside observer, 12 to 14 patients seems like a manageable number, but when you’re the physician/social worker/case manager and more, it can be daunting.
4. What do you want to accomplish professionally within the next five years?
I am privileged to work in the Division of Hospital Medicine at Loyola: I can’t imagine a more spirited group of like-minded individuals exists at any other hospital. As the division chief, my goal for the next 5 years is to help my hospitalists find their “career fit” and advance, whether that’s in education, administration, or research.
5. Can you share a brief (and anonymous) patient encounter or professional situation that made you proud to be an internal medicine physician?
Recently, while on teaching service, my team diagnosed a very complex patient with granulomatosis with polyangiitis. It was as if the patient had fallen out of a textbook. I loved watching the various services come together—rheumatology, nephrology, pulmonology—to assist the patient. The medical students are working on a poster and the residents a clinical vignette. It was a nice reminder of why we do academic internal medicine!