Anderson Marshall, MD (University of Alabama at Birmingham) was born and raised in Central Texas, and completed his undergraduate and medical school at Texas A&M University. He followed in my father’s footsteps pursuing a med-peds residency, and was fortunate to match at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Through residency he found his passion for inpatient care, quality improvement, and medical education with a focus on point-of-care-ultrasound (POCUS). He serves as the Chief Medical Resident of Quality and Safety at the Birmingham VA Hospital for the 2021-2022 academic year, and will continue at UAB as academic faculty at the VA and Children’s Hospitals. Outside of the hospital, hes love cooking (favorite cook book- The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt), hiking, reading (current favorite author- Nathan Lowell), keeping up with college sports, and failing miserably at training his two dogs.

With support from the Bedside Medicine Scholars Program, Anderson is created and implemented a POCUS curriculum as part of undergraduate medical education for students on their acting-internship. His hope is that with early education in POCUS, we can equip young trainees with another diagnostic skill to serve them at the bedside during their residency and throughout their careers.

Justin Choi, MD, MSc (Weill Cornell Medical College) is an academic hospitalist and Assistant Professor of Medicine. He was awarded a CTSC KL2 Career Development Award to study diagnosis of urinary tract infections among hospitalized older adults, and was selected to the Fellowship in Diagnostic Excellence by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine to study team-based diagnosis. His research focuses on diagnostic excellence, team dynamics, and medical decision making for hospitalized patients.

His research project entitled “Error recovery on the wards: focused ethnography of handoffs in new patients admitted overnight in a teaching hospital” evaluated how ward teams generate, identify, and correct diagnostic errors related to bedside medicine. He used a socio-cognitive approach to understand the influence of team dynamics, team-patient interactions, and racial/ethnic diversity on the bedside diagnostic process and performance.

His work has resulted in this publication: Choi JJ, Osterberg LG, Record JD. Exploring Ward Team Handoffs of Overnight Admissions: Key Lessons from Field Observations. J Gen Intern Med. 2024 Apr;39(5):808-814. doi: 10.1007/s11606-023-08549-x. PMID: 38038890.

Dr. Prathit Kulkarni is Assistant Chief of Medicine at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Section of Infectious Diseases at Baylor College of Medicine, both in Houston, Texas. A native of Tyler, Texas, Dr. Kulkarni completed all of his medical training at Baylor, including medical school, residency training in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, chief medical residency in Internal Medicine, and Infectious Diseases fellowship. Prior to completing fellowship training, Dr. Kulkarni served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at the U.S. CDC. Dr. Kulkarni's academic interests span COVID-19, medical education, diagnostic reasoning, and clinical operations. The COVID-19 pandemic also spurred Dr. Kulkarni's interest in telemedicine and telehealth.

His project attempts to understand and optimize the process of telediagnosis in the evaluation of acute medical problems via telehealth modalities. Electronic health records of telehealth encounters will be systematically evaluated to catalog telediagnostic learning opportunities, understand inequities in the delivery of telehealth and accuracy of telediagnosis, and disseminate findings to optimize the delivery of equitable and high-quality telemedicine.

Shub Agrawal, MD MBA (Emory University) is an internal medicine clinician educator. Originally from Athens, Georgia she completed her medical school at the Medical College of Georgia, residency at the J. Willis Hurst Internal Medicine Residency at Emory University, and chief residency at Grady Memorial Hospital. Her interests include applying evidence-based learning science in graduate medical education curricula development and integrating principles of health equity into medical education.

Her project seeks to develop, apply and evaluate a framework for using deliberate reflection to improve diagnostic accuracy & evaluate the impact of social determinants of health on care delivery, focusing on two critical moments for clinical reasoning – diagnostic reasoning upon admission to the hospital, and management reasoning upon discharge from the hospital.

Emily Murphy, MD (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) is an academic Med-Peds hospitalist and Assistant Professor of Medicine & Pediatrics. She completed her medical education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and her residency at the Harvard Brigham & Women’s Hospital/Boston Children’s Hospital Medicine-Pediatrics Residency. She is passionate about both undergraduate and graduate medical education with a focus on social determinants of health (SDoH).

As a Bedside Medicine Scholar, she will design, implement, and evaluate a novel curriculum to educate medical students on how to integrate SDoH into clinical reasoning. She aims to create future physicians who competently consider SDoH in their assessments to provide equitable, individualized care.

Tehreem Rehman, MD, MBA, MPH is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Medical Director at The Mount Sinai Hospital Department of Emergency Medicine.  She holds dual degrees in public health and business administration and has certifications from Epic Physician Builder and the American Board of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. Tehreem has served on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Technical Expert Panels on national quality measures for emergency medicine and is a member of the American College of Emergency Physicians Reimbursement Committee and Health Innovation Technology Committee. She is on the editorial board of the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine and has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Annals of Emergency Medicine, Journal of Public Health Management & Practice, and the Journal of the National Medical Association.

Through support from the Bedside Medicine Scholars Program, Tehreem will develop an interdisciplinary asynchronous curriculum entitled “Clinical Pathways: Advancing Health Equity in Clinical Reasoning”. The objective is to empower trainees to identify areas of significant variation in their bedside patient care and apply quality improvement methodology to achieve evidence-based structure and equity in their clinical reasoning. 

Eldon Matthia, MD (University of Florida in Gainesville) was born and raised in Germany and moved to the United States to pursue his undergraduate and medical school education in South Carolina. He completed internal medicine residency and will graduate from the cardiovascular disease fellowship at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 2025. His medical training and research have fostered a passion for graduate medical education, quality improvement targeting care pathways and health disparities, as well as point-of-care ultrasound in cardiovascular disease. 

With support from the Society of Bedside Medicine Scholars Program, Eldon is developing and administering a heart failure management and focused cardiac ultrasound education curriculum for first-year internal medicine residents targeting patient health literacy and financial barriers to care. He aims to equip internists and their patients with the knowledge and skills needed to manage the increasing complexities of heart failure care.

Alejandra Sadel Chávez Carrera, MD (Highland Hospital, Oakland) is a hospitalist and faculty member at Highland Hospital, where she also completed her internal medicine residency and served as Chief Resident. Originally from Ecuador, she earned her medical degree from Universidad San Francisco de Quito and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Her academic interests include point-of-care ultrasound, curriculum development, and quality improvement. In her current role, Dr. Chávez is actively involved in resident education and leads initiatives to enhance bedside teaching and clinical care through ultrasound integration.

Her project aims to standardize Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) training for Internal Medicine faculty at Highland Hospital, a safety-net institution serving a diverse and underserved population. It has two main goals: to integrate POCUS into home visits, bringing high-quality, equitable care directly to patients who face barriers to access, and to ensure all faculty are trained to use POCUS in daily bedside practice, enhancing diagnostic accuracy and promoting evidence-based care.

Grant Shafer, MD (Children’s Hospital of Orange County) is a neonatologist and a recent graduate of the IHI Improvement Advisor program. Clinically he works in the Surgical neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at CHOC. His academic work focuses on diagnostic safety in the NICU, including recent work studying diagnostic errors during emergent transport from one NICU to another for higher level of care. His long-term goal is to characterize the nature and etiologies of missed diagnostic opportunities in the NICU and to use QI methodology to decrease diagnostic errors in neonatology.

His project focuses on improving the completion of the red reflex examination (RRE) in eligible neonates discharged from the NICU. This critical component of the newborn physical exam screens for congenital ophthalmologic pathology, but it is often not completed in the NICU - increasing the risks that critically-ill newborns may experience a diagnostic error. Dr. Shafer's work as an SBM Scholar will use previously validated quality improvement interventions to improve RRE completion for a large network of 15 NICUs across Southern California.

Alexandra E. Petrakos, MD (Northwestern University) provides outpatient geriatric consultative and primary care at Northwestern's geriatrics clinic, and home-based primary geriatrics care in central Chicago. Her clinical interests are in preventive medicine and high-quality, individualized primary care of older adults. She is also passionate about medical education.

Her project is intended to improve bedside evaluation and diagnosis in older patients with dementia and altered mental status. She will develop and roll out a bedside curriculum in the skilled nursing facility setting with the goal of empowering students, trainees and facility staff to improve their history taking and exam skills for this unique and vulnerable patient population.  

Adam Baim, MD PhD (Northwestern University) is a an ophthalmologist at Northwestern University where he directs the inpatient consultation service.

His project will make Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) available as a diagnostic test for inpatients with serious eye issues. OCT is an incredibly powerful tool but is currently only available in the outpatient clinic. Dr. Baim’s project will also create an automated electronic health record (EHR) app that will ensure that inpatients who receive opthalmologic consultative care will have easier access to appropriate outpatient followup.

Siew May Wang, MD (Northwestern University) is a hospitalist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital where she conducts QI research related to team-based communication.

Her project explores how team dynamics-- specifically handoffs, communication, and collaboration among healthcare team members-- impact the effectiveness of Rapid Response Teams (RRTs). She will be conducting an ethnography study of rapid responses in the hospital to identify areas for potential improvement in both the structure and function of rapid response teams.