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TAMPA, Fla (Nov. 6, 2017) — The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has recognized University of South Florida (USF) physician Dr. Laurie Woodard for exemplifying qualities of a caring and compassionate mentor in the teaching and advising of medical students. She was presented with the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award on Nov. 5 during the AAMC’s annual meeting in Boston, Mass.

Dr. Laurie Woodard received the AAMC 2017 Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award

Dr. Woodard is a professor of family medicine in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, and she co-founded and leads the college’s Health Disparities Scholarly Concentration. She has inspired and nurtured many student-led initiatives supporting underserved communities, including the BRIDGE Clinic, Tampa Bay Street Medicine and USF Health Nicaragua. As a passionate advocate for people with disabilities and their health, Dr. Woodard has developed specialized instruction in disability for medical students at all levels, participates in national efforts to incorporate disability in core health care curricula, and models a hands-on commitment through her community volunteer activities.

“It is a joy to see Dr. Woodard’s tireless efforts to improve care for underserved populations recognized nationally.  I can’t imagine a better role model for our students,” said Kira Zwygart, MD,  associate dean of student affairs and professor of family medicine at the Morsani College of Medicine. “Dr. Woodard has certainly inspired our department over the years, reminding us by her example to uphold humanistic values in the care of our patients and community.”

“She reminds all comers that it is a privilege to work with patients from every walk of life, and her experiences and teaching highlight the value of the relationship and trust that can be formed between a compassionate physician and a patient,” said Sarah Dimino, MD, a 2016 graduate of the Health Disparities Scholarly Concentration.

Dr. Woodard, third from left, with colleagues from the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine at this year’s AAMC Awards Ceremony.

Dr. Woodard was among nine medical educators, researchers and patient care providers from across the country honored by the AAMC at this year’s annual meeting. For more, go to https://news.aamc.org/press-releases/article/aamc_awards_11062017/.

The AAMC is a not-for profit organization that administers the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), which is required for admission to medical schools and residency programs. The AAMC was established in 1876 and is based in Washington, D.C.

Deborah DeWaay, MD, FACP, has been named associate dean of Undergraduate Medical Education in the Office of Educational Affairs of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine (MCOM).

When she begins in late March, Dr. DeWaay will oversee all components for educating MCOM medical students.  Undergraduate medical education is the overall learning experience students have while in medical school that includes the curriculum, clinical rotations, simulation exercises, and peer projects which add to the complete knowledge and skill set students will have at graduation as they transition to be physicians in training during residency.

Dr. Deborah DeWaay. Photo by Tim Roylance.

“Dr. DeWaay brings to USF Health a broad experience for developing medical curricula and her own passion for teaching will greatly impact our students,” Dr. Bognar said. “Her sense for implementing key components that better meet national trends and standards will help us strengthen our program tremendously.”

Prior to joining USF Health, Dr. DeWaay was associate professor of internal medicine, associate vice-chair for Medical Education, and director of the Internal Medicine Clerkship at the Medical University of South Carolina. She earned her medical degree with a distinction in research from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and has won numerous awards for teaching and humanism in medicine.  She is a general internist who practices as a hospitalist.

The Morsani College of Medicine is doing a fantastic job teaching future doctors, Dr. DeWaay said. In her new role, she will help guide the evolution of the medical school curriculum to prepare USF medical students for the ever-changing and rapidly evolving health care system.

“Ideally the educational system focuses on creating physicians who meet the health care system’s needs, and the health care system provides educational opportunities that promote the creation of the physicians it will need,” she said.

Central to the concept, she said, is competency.

“One of my visions is to better incorporate the AAMC’s Entrustable Professional Activities into the curriculum,” she said. “These EPAs are the 13 key skills that, upon graduation, every medical student should be able to demonstrate proficiently before starting residency. Many, if not all, of these 13 activities are likely in the MCOM curriculum already. The next step will be to make student assessment of these competencies even more explicit and to create a system that allows students and educators to glean organized data that will promote continuous improvement of the students and the curriculum.”

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In addition to being able to track competencies, Dr. DeWaay would like to build a system that will let students progress based on those competencies, in order to give added motivation beyond just meeting the competency.

“We have all of these talented students who are anxiously eager to become physicians,” she said. “I want to see our students have their talents cultivated even further prior to residency, so that when they begin their internship the learning curve is alleviated a bit.”

For example, she said, with regard to managing a stroke, if a student has demonstrated competency through simulation exercises, when they rotate with the stroke team, the attendings and residents on that team will know by that student’s presence in that select position that he or she has been trained and proven their ability. Thus, the student can have more responsibility on that team and have an improved experience.

“By increasing the opportunities students have to earn responsibility, we will build their confidence and increase their motivation to push beyond their own perceived limitations” she said.  “In addition, the health system would then provide increased opportunities for students to practice their skill. The result is learners who exceed expectations that allow medical schools to supply even more superior physicians into the health system in order to ultimately provide improved care to our community.”

Another key approach, she said, will be to build stronger clinical decision makers, which means students will have a better, more complete knowledge of the human body. Translated, that means continuing USF’s integration of the basic science and clinical science concepts across all four years. Dr. DeWaay offered this example.

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“In heart failure, for example,” she said, “we administer furosemide, but why? We know all the parameters around dosages, but what else? What is furosemide actually doing? How is our patient’s body actually responding to it? Having a greater foundation in basic science concepts while students are actually in the clinical setting, referencing them directly back to the patient in front of them, will help them be better doctors. It’s called mechanistic thinking, and incorporating it across all four years of medical school will create better clinical decision makers.”

In offering these ideas for what educational approaches make good doctors, Dr. DeWaay is quick to say that it’s a team of educators that helps build the framework.

“It’s important that there’s a unified vision for our goals and that all ideas are considered because there are always different ways to get to our destination,” she said. “The best innovations and solutions to a problem rarely come from one person.  Ideally, the culture cultivates an environment where individuals have novel ideas and the group takes the idea and makes it personalized and successful to the organization at large.”

Once settled in at MCOM, don’t be surprised to see Dr. DeWaay attending classes and clinical rotations as she gains a better sense of what USF medical students and educators are already experiencing. In addition, she will likely keep teaching.

“I can’t imagine not teaching or seeing patients,” Dr. DeWaay said. “Patients, students and residents constantly remind me why I became an academic physician and the great responsibility I have to serve both groups with enthusiasm and excellence.”

Photos by Eric Younghans, USF Health Office of Communications.

USF senior medical student Alicia Billington spoke at a congressional briefing after the Association of American Medical College (AAMC) announced record-breaking medical school enrollment and the need to expand graduate medical education (GME) support.

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The AAMC hosted the briefing Oct. 24, shortly after its release of this year’s medical school applicant and enrollment numbers.   Billington shared her perspective as a medical student about the increasing national demand for more physicians.  The solution, she said, must address the shortage of residency training slots for the growing pipeline of MD graduates.

“Quite frankly, I could go into engineering or a variety of other fields with my MD degree.  I’m here because I want to help patients, but if I don’t have a job in a residency program it will be impossible for me to do that,” said Billington, who is also a PhD candidate at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. “We need to increase the number of residency positions so that our patients can have doctors.”

Alicia Billington, MD-PhD candidate at USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, with Atul Grover, MD,PhD, AAMC chief public policy officer

Billington joined panelists Atul Grover, MD, PhD, chief public policy officer, AAMC, and Suanna Bruinooge, director of research policy, American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Her concerns that graduating students will not be able to match to residencies, despite the impending shortfall of physicians across various specialties, were also highlighted by Dr. Grover in his widely-read AAMC column Second Opinion. 

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To watch Dr. Darrell Kirch’s keynote presentation, click here. To download presentation (130 MB), right click on the folowing link and then select Save As. 
http://health.usf.edu/nocms/publicaffairs/now/videos/Dr%20Kirchlecture2012.m4v

Medical schools need to think differently about what excellence means if they are to lead the way towards reforming healthcare, says the leader of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

“One thing that holds us back … We have fallen into a trap, in academic medicine and nationally, about how we judge excellence, said Dr. Darrell Kirch, president and CEO of the AAMC, at a keynote lecture on the USF Health campus Wednesday evening.

Dr. Darrell Kirch (center), president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, met with students in the SELECT MD program while visiting the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine.

Medical-school excellence, old-style: how high the ranking.

New style? How healthy the community around the school.

Old-style: Mean MCAT scores.

New: Students who are more than smart.

Old: Research funding.

New: Research that makes a difference.

Now is the time to change that thinking, Dr. Kirch said.

“We’ve never needed leadership more than right now in academic medicine and health care,” he said.

Fortunately for the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, Dr. Kirch said he has seen plenty of examples this week that USF is committed to his “new excellence.”

Those signs include the SELECT physician leadership program, the soon-to-open Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation, and USF’s innovative partnership with The Villages retirement community.

Dr. Kirch praised USF Health’s commitment to interprofessional education and the patient-centered focus of the USF Health Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute, the Diabetes Center, and other programs. He is on campus this week visiting USF Health, touring various sites and learning more about USF’s new projects.

“I have validated something that I suspected about all of you, which is that you are committed to excellence in its really critically important forms right now,” Dr. Kirch said.

Dr. Kirch explored the history of medical education, pointing to how the way healthcare was shaped by key milestones in the history of medical education and healthcare.

Educator Abraham Flexner fought for higher standards in medical education, but what Flexner may not have foreseen, Dr. Kirch said, is that adhering to university standards would make medical education place more value in hierarchy and tradition.

Similarly, Dr. James Wyngaarden, director of the National Institutes of Health during the 1980s, fought to support research scientists, more than doubling NIH funding during his tenure. But he also created a culture that places a great deal of value in the individual.

And when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare into law, he created better access to healthcare for older Americans. But he also affirmed a medical culture that pays fees for services, so that doctors are rewarded most when their patients are sick, not well.

“It explains why healthcare is the way it is. Healthcare is individualistic, focused on the expert, often fragmented,” Dr. Kirch said.

That must change.

“It may work for us, but it doesn’t work for an awful lot of people in this country,” he said.

Today’s medicine, Dr. Kirch said, is often hierarchical, autonomous, competitive, individualistic, and expert-centered.

The healthcare of the future needs to be collaborative, team-based, service-based, mutually accountable, and patient-centered.

Making that change won’t be easy, he said. It will require broad systemic change.

“Some have said it’s like trying to redesign an airliner – in flight,” he joked.

That’s why academic medicine must change how it educates students and approaches education, he said. He’s criss-crossing the United States, seeking out new ideas medical schools are pursuing and pushing medical educators to enact new models of excellence.

“I’m optimistic,” Dr. Kirch said. “Because what I’ve seen is a commitment to excellence that is emerging in new ways.”

– Story by Lisa Greene, photos by Eric Younghans, and video production by Amy Mariani and Elizabeth Peacock, USF Health Communications

First Lady mentions USF as example of universities stepping up to care for veterans and their families

Tampa, FL (Jan. 11, 2012) – Today, as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Joining Forces initiative, the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida (USF), the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM) committed to creating a new generation of doctors, medical schools, and research facilities that will make sure our heroes receive the care worthy of their service.

Recognizing veterans and their families’ sacrifice and commitment, the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine pledged to mobilize its uniquely integrated missions in education, research, and clinical care to train the nation’s physicians to meet veterans and their families’ unique health care needs, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

Dr. Stephen Klasko, dean of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, was among the deans who pledged to leverage their academic missions to train physicians to meet the unique health care needs of the military and veterans communities.

“We are honored to participate in the White House Joining Forces initiative to address the health care needs of military service members and veterans and their families,” said Dr. Stephen Klasko, CEO of USF Health and dean of the Morsani College of Medicine . “USF Health has created a veterans reintegration initiative, including our medical school, partners in physical therapy, nursing and other disciplines and two VA hospitals in Tampa Bay, to serve the heroes who have served our country for so long. Our goal is to show these heroes that their country is there for them, no matter what they’re going through.”

“I’m inspired to see our nation’s medical schools step up to address this pressing need for our veterans and military families. By directing some of our brightest minds, our most cutting-edge research, and our finest teaching institutions toward our military families, they’re ensuring that those who have served our country receive the first-rate care that they have earned,” said First Lady Michelle Obama.

First Lady Michelle Obama announced an initiative of the country’s top medical schools, including USF’s, to ensure care for veterans and their families.

Together, the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, the AAMC and AACOM are committing to enriching medical education along its continuum to ensure that physicians are aware of the unique clinical challenges and best practices associated with caring for this group; develop new research and clinical trials on PTSD and TBI so that we can better understand and treat these conditions; share their information and best practices with each other through a collaborative web forum created by the AAMC; and grow the body of knowledge leading to improvements in health care and wellness for our military service members, veterans, and their families.

The University of South Florida is helping create a new generation of integrated comprehensive care for veterans and their families:

• USF is ranked fifth nationwide by Military Times Edge magazine for being veteran friendly and is the only Florida university participating in the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program.

• The USF Health Morsani College of Medicine is affiliated with two major VA Hospitals, including the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital (Tampa, FL), home to one of the five busiest polytrauma centers in the United States. All USF residents and medical students receive part of their training in these VA hospitals.

• The medical director for the new USF Health Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation is Dr. John Armstrong, who previously directed medical simulation for the army and has close ties to U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command.

• Many patents held by USF — ranked ninth worldwide among universities for U.S. patents — are based on medical inventions and therapies in such areas as prosthetics, TBI and brain repair.

• USF is planning a first-of-its-kind Center for Veterans Reintegration, led by Retired Marine Corps General Martin Steele and Dr. Paul Sanberg of the Morsani College of Medicine. This interdisciplinary research, education and treatment facility will propel a unique collaboration among the university, the VA system, Department of Defense and private research and educational entities – all of which are part of the building plan.

First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden created Joining Forces to bring Americans together to recognize, honor and take action to support veterans and military families as they serve our country and throughout their lives. The initiative aims to educate, challenge, and spark action from all sectors of society to ensure veterans and military families have the support they have earned. The initiative focuses on key priority areas – employment, education, and wellness while raising awareness about the service, sacrifice, and needs of America’s veterans and military families. More information is available at: www.JoiningForces.gov.

– USF Health –

USF Health’s mission is to envision and implement the future of health. It is the partnership of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, the College of Nursing, the College of Public Health, the College of Pharmacy, the School of Biomedical Sciences and the School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences; and the USF Physician’s Group. The University of South Florida is a global research university ranked 34th in federal research expenditures for public universities.