JAMA Internal Medicine—Year in Review, 2021 (2024)

We start another year with the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and much coverage in the news and medical journals, as well as progress. Thankfully, we now have widespread vaccinations and effective public health measures. The latest highly contagious Omicron variant, which has slowed the highly anticipated recovery, finally appears to be subsiding. We remain optimistic that we will learn how best to live with this “new normal,”¹ and we can get back to the hard work of promoting high-value health care that is accessible to all.

This year began with a courageous and groundbreaking draft decision by the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to cover a controversial treatment for Alzheimer disease, while actively leading the generation of much needed clinical trial data in partnership with the National Institutes of Health. This innovative framework is known as coverage with evidence development. The drug in question, aducanumab, received accelerated approval in a controversial and fraught decision by the US Food and Drug Administration and led to many questions (and ongoing congressional investigation), including that of a threat to the financial solvency of Medicare. Francis (Jay) Crosson, MD (former MEDPAC chairman, and Editorial Board member), Kenneth Covinsky, MD, MPH, and I wrote a Viewpoint about the implications of drugs that reach market without data of clinical benefit, definite risks, and high costs, such as aducanumab, noting it could prove to be a “9/11 moment” for Medicare.² We are hopeful to see progress in 2022 on complex issues, such as value-based payment, drug pricing, and transparency issues. While COVID-19 continues to dominate the news and our most highly viewed and cited articles (Table^3-11), we are continuing to watch closely the implementation phase of reducing low-value care. The journal’s Less is More series is more than 10 years old and continues to grow, and we are pleased to help inform the conversation with articles on the problems and proposed solutions.

The year 2021 continued to see submissions at nearly twice the number as before the pandemic. It is always a joy to be able to read the work submitted by authors who are trying to move the science of preventing, diagnosing, and treating COVID-19 infection forward, as well as those by authors who submit general medical and policy manuscripts. Thanks to much hard work from an incredible editorial team, our turnaround times for days from receipt to first decision without peer review as well as with peer review remain fast, and are even faster from acceptance to publication and receipt to publication (Table). We love hearing from you, and stories about how publishing in JAMA Internal Medicine boosted your career, helped get you a grant or important committee assignment, or helped in your clinical practice make our day. We also would love to hear what else you would like to see covered in the journal. Others also want to read your work in JAMA Internal Medicine, as there were more than 14.5 million article views and downloads and almost 20 000 media mentions of articles published in the journal in 2021. We strive to publish articles that will help you in your practice of medicine, including the care of patients with COVID-19, either teaching something new to improve outcomes, or a practice to avoid for lack of benefit. We will continue to publish articles on the daily challenges in health care and medicine and focus on ways to improve the experience for clinicians and patients, as well as approaches to improve health care systems.

Our team is pleased to welcome 2 new Associate Editors this year: Cary Gross, MD, Yale University, and Raegan Durant, MD, MPH, University of Alabama (who will also serve as Associate Editor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and of course our always incredible class of Editorial Fellows and elective residents. The North American team of Teachable Moments Editorial Fellows led by Deborah Grady, MD, continues to curate a fascinating and educational collection of articles about patient issues that we can all learn from. We enjoy hearing how you are using the Teachable Moments series and other articles in caring for patients. We encourage you to include a figure or table in your Teachable Moment submission, as many of these articles are the basis of journal club discussions. We will be accepting applications for the 2022-2023 Teachable Moments Editorial Fellow position here, which will be open to internal medicine chief residents across North America in April.

We hope that the visual abstracts included with randomized clinical trial articles have been helpful in understanding; feel free to share them via social media. We hope you continue to enjoy our monthly author interview podcasts and will send us suggestions for topics that you would like to hear covered, as well as any feedback. Please subscribe to the podcast at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/pages/jama-internal-medicine-author-interviews.

We could not do this without our wonderful peer reviewers. We rely on your input to help guide our decisions to help select high-quality science that makes a difference. I thank each and every one of you.¹²

Corresponding Author: Rita F. Redberg, MD, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, 505 Parnassus, M1180, San Francisco, CA 94143-0124 (rita.redberg@ucsf.edu).

Published Online: March 21, 2022. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2022.0464

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Redberg reports grants from Arnold Ventures, Greenwall Foundation, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute outside the submitted work.