Top Articles in Pediatric Hospital Medicine: July 2019 to June 2020

Abstract

The last academic year has been filled with discussions of inequality, overuse, and a chance to reflect on our own biases within medicine. As a field, we took a momentous step forward with the first set of physicians qualifying and sitting for the Pediatric Hospital Medicine (PHM) Subspecialty Boards. This event, however, was embroiled with concerns around gender disparities and inequity, sparking petitions signed by thousands of physicians, and calls for accountability and transparency within our systems. Fast forward 4 months and the world was turned upside down in the face of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. Pediatric hospitalists in locations like New York City converted pediatric units to adult units, precepted internal medicine residents, and within a period of weeks organized the Pediatric Overflow Planning Contingency Response Network. Finally, police violence, killings, and protests have brought systemic racism to the forefront as a public health crisis. We care for children regardless of their cultural backgrounds, gender orientation, and socioeconomic status (SES); as such, we as a community have the chance to play a critical role in instigating change for addressing and uprooting systemic racism. In this context, we have reviewed with a critical lens articles published from July 2019 through June 2020 to winnow down the expanse of literature over this past 12 months into the Top Articles for PHM (an annual presentation at the PHM conference). In undertaking this endeavor, we reviewed 11 925 articles from 19 journals (Table 1). We conducted this review in 3 steps, detailed in Fig 1. In the first step, we reviewed article titles and eliminated articles on the basis of a series of questions to broadly …