My name is Jim Allen and I am recently retired as the Medical Director at the Ohio State University East Hospital, as of May 2021. I started off my medical director career as the director of Ohio State’s pulmonary function lab and bronchoscopy suite more than 20 years ago. Over the years, I’ve been the medical director of the OSU Medical Intensive Care Unit, the medical director of the OSU site of Select Specialty Hospital, the chief of internal medicine at University Hospital East, a physician advisor for the hospital, and the medical director of pulmonary rehab at our hospital. For 15 years, I was also a vice chairman of the OSU Department of Internal Medicine and was the treasurer for internal medicine at Ohio State. One of my other jobs at the university was the editor and moderator of OSU MedNet, a weekly continuing medical education webcast sponsored by the OSU College of Medicine.
Ohio State University East Hospital has about 200 inpatient beds and serves as the community hospital for the OSU Wexner Medical Center. OSU East Hospital is on the near east side of Columbus, about 8 miles from the OSU campus. Although primarily a community hospital, OSU East Hospital has specialty emphasis in orthopedics, addiction medicine, and wound care. Most of the OSU medical students, residents, and fellows rotate at our hospital at some time during their careers and during those rotations, we familiarize them with community medicine practice. My primary missions as medical director were to align the clinical resources of the hospital with the clinical needs of the community, to provide a venue for community medicine training for our students and residents, and to do it all in a financial viable way.
My clinical specialty is pulmonary and critical care medicine. At the time of retirement in May 2021, about 30% of my time was spent in clinical care, primarily in the management of patients with interstitial lung disease. I spent 10% of my time with MedNet and the remaining 60% of my time was devoted to my hospital medical director position.
I started this blog to provide commentary about the issues that I’ve had to face in my medical director positions: sometimes serious, sometimes sad, sometimes humorous, but always based on situations that I’ve encountered.