After nearly eight years as director of the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa, Dr. Richard Hoffman, a professor of internal medicine, stepped down and retired to Arizona in January 2022 where he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson and its Division of General Internal Medicine, Geriatrics & Palliative Medicine. As an Emeritus Professor at Iowa, he continues collaborating with UI colleagues. Since coming to the University of Iowa from the University of New Mexico, Dr. Hoffman’s tenure was marked by several significant achievements, most notably his support for implementing the lung cancer screening programs at UI Health Care and at the Iowa City VA Medical Center, successfully recruiting many clinician educators and researchers, and his stewardship of the division throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
The establishment of the Influenza-Like Illness clinic relied on many members of Dr. Hoffman’s division and the recognition that primary care clinicians would constitute the vanguard of much of the institution’s prevention efforts. Once COVID-19 infections began to rise and the importance of keeping those individuals safe at home became critical to their health, to slowing the virus’s spread, and to preserving precious bedspace in the hospital, the GIM hospitalists’ Home Treatment Team became an important component of UI's pandemic response. He continued to support clinical care and research into understanding the disease through staffing and recruitment of faculty members to work in the hospital’s influential Long COVID clinic.
His own research has had impacts on the national conversation, particularly around the importance of shared decision-making for screening for prostate, colorectal, and lung cancers and for treatment decisions for low-risk prostate cancers. Among his more than 200 publications, Dr. Hoffman has explored the questions of which populations possess the highest risk and should be screened and which were exposed to greater harms through screening. Before coming to Iowa, he had been site-PI on NIH/NCI-investigations looking at correlations between race, comorbidity, diagnosis, treatment, and long-term prostate cancer outcomes, particularly among African Americans. That focus on inequities continued here as funding from the VA Office of Rural Health allowed him to examine differences in lung-cancer outcomes for rural veterans. Funding from the NHLBI, CDC, and VA Office of Rural Health allowed Hoffman similar avenues of investigation in evaluating strategies to implement decision-support for cancer screening, particularly incorporating decision aids and telemedicine.