2024 Excellence in Teaching
The recipient of this award has led numerous curricular changes at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai with a focus on real-time case presentations, problem representation, and illness script formation.
Alfred Burger, MD, MS, SFHM, FACP, is a professor of medicine and medical education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the senior associate program director for the Internal Medicine Residency at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. As a practicing hospitalist, Dr. Burger frequently engages in teaching on the medical floors, focusing on various aspects such as clinical reasoning, high value care, quality improvement, patient safety, and leadership skills for physicians.
In his role as an associate residency director, Dr. Burger has led numerous curricular changes. He restructured morning report to focus on real-time case presentations with increased emphasis on problem representation and illness script formation. He has instituted and enhanced the quality improvement curriculum. Dr. Burger established a High Value Care Resident Committee that has mentored many successful projects. His initiation of review sessions for medical conference abstract submissions resulted in a remarkable sevenfold increase in abstract acceptances, with over 700 presentations during his tenure at Mount Sinai Beth Israel.
Dr. Burger is also active at a national level. He served on the ACGME IM Milestones 2.0 Workgroup and authored an ABIM Choosing Wisely Guideline. He represents SHM to the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine’s Internal Medicine Education Advisory Board. Dr. Burger was an inaugural member of SHM’s Physicians in Training Committee and helped pioneer the young hospitalist track at the annual meeting. As chair of SHM’s Digital Learning Committee, he assisted in the selection of the HSM educational app. He is an active member of the SHM Education Committee and will serve as the chair of the Annual Conference Committee and course director for the 2026 SHM Converge meeting.
Dr. Burger is dedicated to teaching residents and medical students of all levels. He has encouraged students and residents to ask the deep questions and take on academic projects, inspiring residents to successful publications such as in in JHM’s Things We Do for No Reason section or on their own systematic reviews and meta-analyses in high impact journals covering a wide range of topics. Over his 20 years as an educator, Dr. Burger has mentored hundreds of physicians who have gone on to successful careers in internal medicine and its subspecialties.
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