Brown Alpert Medical School Stroke Researcher to Discuss Big Finding on LIVE at 4:15 PM – GoLocalProv

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Tuesday, February 25, 2020

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Brown Alpert Medical School stroke researcher to discuss big finding

"In recent years, we have started to learn more about how well-established stroke risk factors like high blood pressure and diabetes differ between women and men. Unfortunately, we still lack an understanding of how female hormones affect stroke risk across the lifespan for women," said Madsen, M.D., Sc.M., lead author of the study and assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School.

Low levels of a protein that binds to and transports sex hormones in the blood may indicate women who have a higher risk of ischemic stroke, according to preliminary research just presented by Madsen at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2020 in Los Angeles, a world premiere meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science of stroke and brain health. The corresponding article was published in the journal Stroke.

About Madsen

Madsen is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine in the Division of Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine within the Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Madsen completed both her undergraduate and medical degrees at Boston University before coming to Providence to complete a residency in Emergency Medicine.

Following residency, Dr. Madsen completed a 2-year research fellowship with a focus on sex and gender differences in acute aspects of disease and earned a Master's degree in Clinical and Translational Research.

About Alpert Medical School -- and Smart Health

Since granting its first Doctor of Medicine degrees in 1975, the Warren Alpert Medical School has become a national leader in medical education and biomedical research.

By attracting first-class physicians and researchers to Rhode Island over the past four decades, the Medical School and its seven affiliated teaching hospitals have radically improved the state's health care environment, from health care policy to patient care.

"Smart Health" is a GoLocalProv.com segment featuring experts from The Warren Alpert Medical School GoLocal LIVE.

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Brown Alpert Medical School Stroke Researcher to Discuss Big Finding on LIVE at 4:15 PM - GoLocalProv

Realizing the medical school dream, for himself and his family – Scope

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Jimmy Zheng was in the 10th grade whenhe decided to try to pay his own way through college and beyond.

His mother, who worked as a grocery store clerk, had recently fallen from a ladder, and was forced to give up her job after a hospital stay. Though his father continued to put in long hours for his online leather goods business, the return was modest -- not the dream they had hoped to achieve when they immigrated from China to California.

"I realized they were working really hard, but theywere not really succeeding in the way they thought they would, coming here toAmerica," Zheng told me. "That moment was really critical for me to realize,I'm actually going to need to do some work to lift up this family, movingforward."

Scholarships and multiple jobs helped Zheng pay for college; and after graduating, he took a consulting position to continue supporting himself. He dreamed of becoming a doctor, but thought he'd have to delay a few years because of the cost. Stanford Medicine worked with him to provide an option he could afford, and he's now in his second year of medical school.

"The financial aid made a difference in terms of the timeline of my trajectory and my career path," Zheng said. "To me, that's everything, because the earlier I can go into medicine, the earlier I can start living my dream and my passion -- and also support myself and my family."

His words resonated with me and my colleagues, as we worked on #WeAreStanfordMed, a series of videos exploring how financial assistance impacts Stanford Medicine students. We wanted to tell the stories of those who have benefitted from scholarships and programs that defray the costs of medical school.

Many fall into this category. During the past academic year, more than two-thirds of Stanford medical students received some form of financial aid, and the median debt for last year's graduating class -- just over $89,000 -- was significantly less than the national median of $200,000 reported by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

This is no coincidence: Stanford Medicine leaders have long worked to address the rising cost of medical education, including through an ongoing mission to reduce graduating debt. Last week, the school reached a milestone in that journey, announcing a $90 million program that will eliminate medical school debt for students with the most need.

Removing financial barriers can make a big difference for promising young physicians-in-training, as we learned from Zheng and the other students in our videos.

Zheng told us that his aid means he doesn't have to work side jobs, like he did in college, and he can focus on his studies and an array of related activities. In his first year of medical school, he worked on machine-learning research to automate detection and classification of certain diseases and conditions. He also was a student leader in a public health effort to get flu vaccines to underserved communities, and he mentored high school students interested in science and medicine.

Zheng said that his strong sense of service comes from his parents. Inspired by them and his volunteer work at a homeless clinic, he envisions a career in primary care, working with the medically underserved. The decision will be easier because he knows he'll have minimal debt from medical school, Zheng said.

"Something about working with people who have been overlooked by society, people who are struggling and don't have the resources to thrive -- that reminded me a lot of immigrant populations, of people I came from," Zheng told me, my colleague Margarita Gallardo and videographer Kevin German during filming.

Seeing him with his parents -- casually joking with them, draping his arms protectively around their shoulders -- touched our hearts. Learning his story -- and those of the four other students -- inspired us and made us feel proud to be part of an institution that is ensuring the next generation of physicians reflects the diversity of the communities they serve.

#WeAreStanfordMed is a video series spotlighting Stanford medical students and the impact of financial assistance on their education and aspirations.

Photo and video by Luceo

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Realizing the medical school dream, for himself and his family - Scope

Zipfel named Dacey Distinguished Professor of Neurological Surgery – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

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Professorship honors former neurosurgery head

Gregory Zipfel, MD, (right) has been named the Ralph G. Dacey Distinguished Professor of Neurological Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The professorship was established in honor of Ralph G. Dacey, MD, (left) former head of the Department of Neurosurgery.

Gregory J. Zipfel, MD, the recently named head of theDepartment of Neurosurgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and neurosurgeon-in-chief at Barnes-Jewish Hospital (BJH),is also now the inaugural Ralph G. Dacey Distinguished Professor of Neurological Surgery.

The professorship was funded by dozens of friends, colleagues and admirers of Dacey, the Henry G. & Edith R. Schwartz Professor of Neurological Surgery. Dacey served as the head of the neurosurgery department at the School of Medicine and neurosurgeon-in-chief at BJH from 1989 to earlier this year.

Zipfel, a noted expert on aneurysms and other disorders of blood vessels in the brain, was installed by Chancellor Andrew D. Martin and David H. Perlmutter, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs, the George and Carol Bauer Dean of the School of Medicine, and the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Distinguished Professor.

Im honored to recognize both Dr. Dacey and Dr. Zipfel with this professorship, Martin said. Under Dr. Daceys leadership, the Department of Neurosurgery grew into one of the best in the world, known for cutting-edge research, high-quality and compassionate care, and world-class neurosurgical training. Dr. Zipfel an accomplished neurosurgeon, teacher and scientist is an able successor to Dr. Dacey, and I believe he will help build on our momentum of national and international leadership in neurosurgery at Washington University and BJC HealthCare.

Dacey is renowned for his accomplishments in cerebrovascular research, particularly in regard to diseases of the cerebrovascular system. He also has made myriad contributions to the clinical practice of neurosurgery and to resident training and education.

This professorship is a true testament to Dr. Daceys achievements in medicine and to the high regard in which friends, colleagues and patients hold him, Perlmutter said. For many years, if something happened in St. Louis that involved the brain, Ralph was there. If he couldnt do it himself, he assembled a team of the most talented neurosurgeons in the world to handle it. His accomplishments have elevated the field, the faculty, his students and clinical care to new heights.

During his three decades at the helm of the Department of Neurosurgery, Dacey promoted an expansion of clinical and basic research efforts, while maintaining the departments emphasis on clinical excellence and world-class training and education. Nearly 70% of the graduates of the departments residency program enter academic careers at some of the most highly regarded neurosurgery departments in the country, including several who have become faculty here at Washington University.

In December 1998, Dacey performed the first neurosurgery that used magnetic gradients to direct probes in the brain. He also spearheaded the creation of an intraoperative MRI facility at BJH to allow physicians to scan the brain during a surgery to ensure complete removal of tumors.

This is the greatest honor of my life, Dacey said of the named professorship. I am incredibly lucky to have such generous friends and colleagues. Greg Zipfel is a great researcher, leader and surgeon, and I am confident that under his leadership, the department will continue to thrive.

Dacey is a former chair of the American Board of Neurological Surgery and has served as president of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, the American Academy of Neurological Surgeons, and the Society of Neurological Surgeons. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, was named an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and is a recipient of the Harvey Cushing Medal from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the highest honor bestowed by the association.

In 2018, the Joint Cerebrovascular Section of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons established the Ralph G. Dacey Jr., MD, Medal for Outstanding Cerebrovascular Research in recognition of his accomplishments in the area of cerebrovascular research, his myriad contributions to neurosurgery, and his unwavering leadership in the area of resident training and education.

Ralph is the kind of leader who brings out the best in his team, Zipfel said. He creates the environment that encourages excellence, recruits talented and dedicated people, and challenges us all to do our best. He is truly a giant, and we all stand on his shoulders. I am honored to be named the first Dacey professor.

From the left, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin, Gregory Zipfel, MD, Ralph Dacey, MD, and David H. Perlmutter, MD, dean of the medical school and executive vice chancellor for medical affairs, pose for a photo taken by Jana Holstein, of Alumni & Development, as they celebrate Zipfels installation as the inaugural Ralph G. Dacey Distinguished Professor of Neurological Surgery.

Zipfels surgical practice is focused on cerebrovascular disease and tumors that grow near the base of the skull. He is known for his expertise in surgically correcting weak spots in blood vessels, known as aneurysms, and other blood vessel malformations in the brain; removing complicated tumors near the skull base; and creating surgical bypasses around blocked or diseased arteries of the brain to increase blood supply.

Also a professor of neurology and co-director of the Stroke and Cerebrovascular Center at BJH, Zipfel has focused his laboratory research on understanding how aneurysm ruptures cause brain injury. Such ruptures often lead to permanent brain damage or death, even following emergency surgery. Zipfel has helped identify some of the molecular and cellular features associated with brain injury after sudden rupture of aneurysms. This work has led to the discovery of experimental drugs aimed at reducing brain injury after aneurysm rupture, two of which are being evaluated in clinical trials.

Zipfel also studies how altered blood flow in the brain contributes to dementia. By investigating the impact of amyloid plaques a hallmark of Alzheimers disease and stress from reactive oxygen molecules a common feature of aging on blood vessels in the brain, Zipfel has advanced the understanding of cognitive decline in Alzheimers and aging.

Following his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois, Zipfel earned his medical degree at Northwestern University and completed a residency in neurosurgery at the University of Florida. During residency, Zipfel spent two years doing postdoctoral research with Dennis Choi, MD, PhD, at the School of Medicine. Zipfel then completed a fellowship in cerebrovascular and skull-base surgery at the University of Miami. In 2004, he returned to St. Louis and joined the faculty of the School of Medicine.

Washington University School of Medicines 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Childrens hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Childrens hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

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Zipfel named Dacey Distinguished Professor of Neurological Surgery - Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Women Outnumber Men in Medical School – The Realist Woman

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For the first time, women outnumber men in medical school. According to a new report from the Association of American Medical Colleges, women made up 50% of medical students in 2019, while men made up 49% of students.

Overall, men still make up the majority of doctors with 64% dominating in the profession, as compared to 36% of women. A joint report between the AAMC and the American Medical Association found disparities among men in women in their chosen fields.

Male doctors outnumber female doctors in the orthopedic, neurological and interventional radiology fields. Female doctors dominate in pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, allergy and immunology. Fields with an equal amount of men and women include pathology, psychiatry, sleep medicine and preventive medicine.

Theres also an age disparity among doctors with 80% of doctors age 65 or older in 2017 being men and 60% of younger doctors under the age of 35 being women.

The Realist Womans take:

Women surpassed men as students in medical school for the first time ever. Its incredible. I specifically love the fact that 60% of doctors under age 35 are female. Women really are making their mark in the world of medicine and I hope this story inspires young girls who dream of being doctors.

I noticed in the report that female doctors dominate in the fields that serve female patients, which makes sense because female doctors understand women's issues in a way that men cannot. But I'm sure that women in the fields that male doctors dominate are just as excellent as their male counterparts as women can do everything men can.

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Women Outnumber Men in Medical School - The Realist Woman

Providing Holistic Preventive Health with Advanced Primary Care – HealthITAnalytics.com

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January 03, 2020 -Primary care has the potential to transform the healthcare industry by improving patient outcomes and reducing overall spend on healthcare services. Study after study shows that value-based care, population health management, chronic disease treatment, and other value-adding activities hinge on the delivery of comprehensive, coordinated primary care.

Yet, fewer patients than ever before have an established primary care provider, according to a study conducted by a group of researchers from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Womens Hospital, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Primary care is the thread that runs through the fabric of all health care, and this study demonstrates we are potentially slowly unweaving that fabric, David Levine, Harvard Medical School instructor in medicine at Brigham and Womens Hospital, said in a statement. America is already behind the curve when it comes to primary care; this shows we are moving in the wrong direction.

However, even when primary care is available, physicians and their team members are finding it difficult to deliver the level of care needed to improve outcomes and lower costs. For example, family physicians surveyed by the American Academy of Family Physicians last year complained about a lack of time and resources, which impacted the quality of conversations they were having with patients.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Womens Hospital, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center also criticized the industrys low reimbursement rates for primary care and the dearth of policies that support primary care infrastructure investments.

The advanced primary care (APC) model is the business of whole patient health, according to Stuart Pollack, MD, the medical director of Brigham and Womens Advanced Primary Care Associates.

Its a new design of primary care where instead of being in the visit business, we are in the whole patient business, he recently told HealthITAnalytics.com.

Stuart Pollack, MD, Medical Director of Brigham and Women's Advanced Primary Care Associates, South Huntington

Overall, the APC model differs from traditional primary care because of its definition of health.

We think of whole health: social, mental, and physical wellbeing, Ryan Schmid, MBA, chief executive officer and president of Vera Whole Health, which uses the APC model for all its primary care patients. Unless you build a care model thats designed to treat the whole person as opposed to physical disease or infirmity, its really not advanced primary care.

For example, a patient recently diagnosed with type two diabetes will talk with a health coach about their underlying motivations for better health under an APC model, Schmid explained.

The coach is going to understand that whats motivating the person is their kids wedding or being alive to play with their grandkids, he said. This is all in partnership with the provider, but its a totally different experience for that patient. The integration piece is super critical.

A large piece of creating a holistic approach to patient care requires delivering empathy towards patients, added Kyle Grunder, MBA, director of provider operations and program development Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute at Allina Health. At Courage Kenney, the APC model is for specific patient populations, such as those with a neurologic deficit, neurological impairment, or mobility impairment.

What weve been able to do is form a bond with these patients so were their first call, Grunder said. They entrust us with their care, and we take that seriously. In creating that really close bond, confidence, and trust you have an ideal patient experience.

A system of trust creates strong patient-provider relationships. Patients who make their primary care provider their first call are more likely to stay out of the emergency department, receiving less fragmented care and reducing care costs.

But for organizations to realize the benefits of APC, they need to implement a team-based care approach, data analytics tools, a social determinants of health strategy, and a new financial model.

Creating care teams is a pillar of the APC model. The team-based approach allows the entire team to work towards bettering patients health, addressing their medical, behavioral, and social determinant of health needs.

Most primary care physicians are sophisticated enough to recognize that you cant really provide good primary care without a team, said Pollack.

Vera, Brigham, and Courage Kennys care teams are all unique. However, these teams are typically centered around a physician, nurse or advanced practice provider, and a medical assistant. Depending on the care model and the needs of the patient, these teams can also include behavioral health specialists, health coaches, pharmacists, nutritionists, social workers, and other healthcare professionals.

Who is on the care team in an APC model will depend on patient mix at the practice.

The team for our Medicare population is going to look different than the team for our commercial population, Schmid explained. You could certainly extend that team depending on the population and the degree to which you want to bring in certain specialists.

The patient population should also dictate how care team members interact and deliver care.

Ryan Schmid, MBA, President and CEO of Vera Whole Health

That care team has to be specifically built to target specific populations, Schmid continued. Its not enough to throw a bunch of folks wearing different hats in the same building. They have to be functioning off the same care plan for individual members and offer a broader population health strategy for whichever population theyre serving.

In Brighams model, the medical assistants are responsible for conducting initial screenings with the patient such as behavioral health, domestic violence, and depression. Information from this screening is then passed on to the rest of the team to coordinate further care.

We expect the medical assistants to start looking at the real-time overdue health maintenance items and tee the patient up for the physicians, Pollack said. Theres more work to be done but were trying to spread it out over the entire team.

Tailored care teams are key to accomplishing one of the overarching goals of the APC model: coordinating care.

The advanced primary care team is in the quarterback seat with the patient as opposed to the patient getting sucked up into specialty land where there are multiple specialists managing their care, said Schmid.

Brigham and Womens Advanced Primary Care Associates also coordinates care on site. For example, a patient newly diagnosed with diabetes will see a pharmacist for insulin and a nutritionist to go over healthy eating habits on site at the point of diagnosis.

Rather than wait weeks between appointments and risking disjointed care, all of the patients needs are coordinated or delivered on sites. Patients are then set up to successfully adhere to care recommendations.

Its more of a one-stop-shop. Patients can get their lab work done, walk away with their prepackaged medication, and in some cases, get imaging done. They can meet with the health coach and the behavioral health consultant under one roof, said Schmid. Its an infinitely better experience.

Relying on a team of providers also supports longer care visits, which are another pillar of the APC model.

We have extended visit length, so most patients are seen in a 60-minute window versus a traditional primary care model where appointments are between 15 and 30 minutes, Grunder explained.

The care team needs actionable data to provide insights and direct the best care possible.

Traditionally, actionable data meant identifying high-risk patients and connecting them to high-quality care quickly. But this is not enough under the APC model.

The traditional population health risk pyramid of low risk, rising risk, and high risk are too static for a true advanced primary care solution, said Schmid. You have, for example, a rising risk person with depression and diabetes who, unless you take further preventive action, may end up developing additional chronic conditions. Understanding where folks are in real-time and having specific care models designed to treat those people is what we mean by a population health strategy.

Sophisticated data and analytics can inform population health strategies.

Were as much a digital company as we are a healthcare company, Schmid explained You have to ingest a ton of data, mash it together, and then spit out hyper actionable data to people who understand what to do with it. Information is useless unless its actionable and to be actionable folks have to understand it.

To make all this data actionable, Brigham and Womens Advanced Primary Care Associates uses algorithms to identify patients best suited for their care delivery model. But everyone else is identified based on what they need at the moment, Pollack noted. So, real-time data and analytics are also critical.

Data and analytics also demonstrate effective cost savings. For Grunder at Courage Kenny, this helps grant applications and donor relations.

We were able to create a database of all the claims costs for our patients and marry that with our clinical informatics to have a true picture of how much these individuals are spending, he noted. We found through our data analytics that on a year by year basis, we were saving just Medicaid fee-for-service patients enrolled in our clinic an upwards of $1.5 to 2 million per year.

Providers cannot furnish holistic care without addressing social determinants of health. Factors such as the environment, socioeconomic status, and access to healthy food options account for 60 percent of an individuals health.

That means while most patients come into the clinic with a physical condition, there is often an underlying psychosocial theme that contributes to the physical condition, Schmid explained.

Unless you really have a model with the time and resources to support the patient, youre just putting a Band-Aid on things, he furthered.

The APC model, however, can help primary care practices develop the resources needed to identify and treat all the factors impacting patient outcomes and spending, the industry experts agreed.

Particularly, the team-based care model of advanced primary care encourages addressing these factors by various members of the team.

Kyle Grunder, MBA, Director of Provider Operations and Program Development, Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute and Spine Clinical Service Lines, Allina Health

So much of managing this patient population is navigating the healthcare system, which you dont need a physician to do, Grunder emphasized. The physicians in our model are focusing on the patients that are in a tough spot and need to be seen. Theyre not spending their time making sure a patient is food secure. We have other team members doing that.

One of the most overlooked social determinants of health is the accessibility of healthcare. An inaccessible system, regardless of its quality, can lead to delayed and disjointed care. Extending visit times and managing all aspects of care can help overcome these challenges and make the patient less intimidated by the healthcare system.

If you can immediately get roomed and then all services come to the member as opposed to making them walk around, it's infinitelymore consumer-centric, Schmid explained. The unsolicited feedback that we receive is that this is the first time patients ever truly felt heard by their doctors or care team.

Courage Kenny takes accessibility one step further, ensuring their patients have no physical barriers to entering the clinic doors.

Part of the reason why the clinic is unique and different is that we are structurally and physically set up to take care of some of the most complex patient populations, noted Grunder.

The APC model elevates primary care by enabling providers to deliver coordinated, preventive care that treats the whole patient, not just his physical conditions. But providers can only achieve these goals by implementing a financial model alongside the APC model.

The traditional healthcare financing system does not support the APC model, industry experts agreed.

The way that the fee-for-service financial model works is physicians are actually incentivized to not provide the care and refer out because it can be done and charged more somewhere else in the system. From an intrinsically motivated primary care provider standpoint, it's really, really disheartening, noted Schmid.

With fee-for-service still being the dominant revenue stream for provider organizations, the APC model may not be gaining the traction experts have hoped for.

Our financial model is not one that is sustainable in a fee-for-service environment, Grunder explained. Most clinic models do not have the funding mechanism or the drive to add in lay healthcare workers to support the clinician because theyre still in a fee-for-service environment. Theyre more driven to see patients frequently than to manage them outside of the visit.

That means organizations cannot do even the most basic APC capabilities, such as emailing the patient and coordinating care over the phone whenever possible.

Frankly, there's no financial incentive to bring somebody in if you can help them over the phone, video, or even messaging, noted Schmid.

Such a system requires strong financial backing and alignment of financial incentives across all aspects of the system, Schmid added.

In our world, that means the patient, the care teams, the company, and then whomever were contracting with, he said. Unless everybody has the same financial goals in mind, youre just recreating some version of a sick care fee-for-service world.

Without financial alignment across payers and providers, grants and donations are keeping the APC model alive at organizations like Courage Kenny.

We have largely survived over the last five years by grants and demonstration projects. We were part of the CMS innovation grant and received a grant from CMS to run the clinic. Weve had support from our Courage Kenny Foundation, he reported.

However, Grunder stressed that this APC financing model is not sustainable. Fortunately, payers and providers are starting to see the value in switching their revenue sources to deliver better primary care.

Innovative payment mechanisms are quickly taking off to support these care models, including the Center for Medicare and Medicaids Comprehensive Primary Care Plus. The goal of the model is to increase access to care while improving the quality and efficiency through advanced primary care methods. It aims to do that by paying participants a non-visit-based care management fee paid per-beneficiary-per-month. Participants can also earn value-based incentive payments based on their performance on quality metrics.

Similar models are starting to crop up across the industry, too. The Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network recently reported that the number of healthcare payments made through an alternative payment model increased to 35.8 percent in 2018.

The industry is slowly transitioning to a more sustainable payment model for APC. But being in the patient business is worth it.

Its the right thing to do for patients and its the right thing to do for society, Pollack concluded.

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AVITA Medical and the Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus Enter into Collaboration to Explore…

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VALENCIA, Calif., MELBOURNE, Australia & AURORA, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AVITA Medical (ASX: AVH, NASDAQ: RCEL), a regenerative medicine company with a technology platform positioned to address unmet medical needs in therapeutic skin restoration, and scientists at the Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine announced today a preclinical research collaboration to establish proof-of-concept and explore further development of a spray-on treatment of genetically modified cells for patients with epidermolysis bullosa (EB), with potential applicability to other genetic skin disorders.

The partnership will pair AVITA Medicals patented and proprietary Spray-On Skin Cells technology and expertise with the Gates Centers innovative, patent-pending combined reprogramming and gene-editing technology to allow cells to function properly. Under the terms of the Sponsored Research Agreement (SRA), AVITA Medical retains the option to exclusively license technologies emerging from the partnership for further development and commercialization. The Gates Center team is further supported by the EB Research Partnership in New York, the Los Angeles-based EB Medical Research Foundation, the London-based Cure EB Charity, and government grants in a collaborative effort to rapidly develop and translate this technology to the clinic for meaningful impact on patient lives.

The Gates Center is a leader in developing therapeutic approaches for genetic skin diseases. Researchers at the Gates Center have developed a powerful new approach for treating genetic skin disorders and improving the lives of patients with epidermolysis bullosa, said Dr. Mike Perry, Chief Executive Officer of AVITA Medical and adjunct professor at the Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine. We look forward to collaborating with the team at the Gates Center on the expanded use of our technology. This agreement marks an important milestone in AVITAs mission to harness the potential of regenerative medicine to address unmet medical needs across a broad range of dermatological indications, including genetic disorders of the skin.

Epidermolysis bullosa is a group of rare and incurable skin disorders caused by mutations in genes encoding structural proteins resulting in skin fragility and blistering, leading to chronic wounds and, in some sub-types, an increased risk of squamous cell carcinoma or death. There are no approved curative therapies, and current treatment is palliativefocused primarily on pain and nutritional management, itching relief, wound care, and bandaging.

Its very exciting to partner with AVITA Medical to help advance our epidermolysis bullosa program, said Director of the Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine Dr. Dennis Roop. Were looking forward to exploring a novel approach to delivering gene-edited skin cells to patients that addresses current treatment challenges.

We believe that Spray-On Skin Cells technology combined with our genetically corrected cells has the potential to be game changing in the treatment of this disease. This combination could reduce time to treatment, lower manufacturing complexity, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes, said Dr. Ganna Bilousova, assistant professor of dermatology, who is a co-principal investigator on this research program.

ABOUT THE CHARLES C. GATES CENTER FOR REGENERATIVE MEDICINE

The Charles C. Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine was established in 2006 with a gift in memory of Denver industrialist and philanthropist Charles C. Gates, who was captivated by the hope and benefit stem cell research promised for so many people in the world. The Gates Center aspires to honor what he envisionedby doing everything possible to support the collaboration between basic scientific researchers and clinical faculty to transition scientific breakthroughs into clinical practice as quickly as possible.

Led by Founding Director Dennis Roop, Ph.D., the Gates Center is located at the University of Colorados Anschutz Medical Campus, the largest new biomedical and clinical campus in the United States. Operating as the only comprehensive Stem Cell Center within a 500-mile radius, the Gates Center shares its services and resources with an ever-enlarging membership of researchers and clinicians at the Anschutz Medical Campus, which includes University of Colorado Hospital, Childrens Hospital Colorado, and the Veterans Administration Medical Center, as well as the Boulder campus, Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines, and business startups. This collaboration is designed to draw on the widest possible array of scientific exploration relevant to stem cell technology focused on the delivery of innovative therapies in Colorado and beyond.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine work to advance science and improve care. These faculty members include physicians, educators, and scientists at University of Colorado Hospital, Childrens Hospital Colorado, Denver Health, National Jewish Health, and the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The school is located on the Anschutz Medical Campus, one of four campuses in the University of Colorado system. To learn more about the medical schools care, education, research, and community engagement, visit its web site.

ABOUT AVITA MEDICAL LIMITED

AVITA Medical is a regenerative medicine company with a technology platform positioned to address unmet medical needs in burns, chronic wounds, and aesthetics indications. AVITA Medicals patented and proprietary collection and application technology provides innovative treatment solutions derived from the regenerative properties of a patients own skin. The medical devices work by preparing a REGENERATIVE EPIDERMAL SUSPENSION (RES), an autologous suspension comprised of the patients skin cells necessary to regenerate natural healthy epidermis. This autologous suspension is then sprayed onto the areas of the patient requiring treatment.

AVITA Medicals first U.S. product, the RECELL System, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September 2018. The RECELL System is indicated for use in the treatment of acute thermal burns in patients 18 years and older. The RECELL System is used to prepare Spray-On Skin Cells using a small amount of a patients own skin, providing a new way to treat severe burns, while significantly reducing the amount of donor skin required. The RECELL System is designed to be used at the point of care alone or in combination with autografts depending on the depth of the burn injury. Compelling data from randomized, controlled clinical trials conducted at major U.S. Burn Centers and real-world use in more than 8,000 patients globally, reinforce that the RECELL System is a significant advancement over the current standard of care for burn patients and offers benefits in clinical outcomes and cost savings. Healthcare professionals should read the INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE - RECELL Autologous Cell Harvesting Device (https://recellsystem.com/) for a full description of indications for use and important safety information, including contraindications, warnings, and precautions.

In international markets, our products are marketed under the RECELL System brand to promote skin healing in a wide range of applications, including burns, chronic wounds, and aesthetics. The RECELL System is TGA-registered in Australia and received CE-mark approval in Europe.

To learn more, visit http://www.avitamedical.com.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This letter includes forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the use of words such as anticipate, expect, intend, could, may, will, believe, estimate, look forward, forecast, goal, target, project, continue, outlook, guidance, future, other words of similar meaning and the use of future dates. Forward-looking statements in this letter include, but are not limited to, statements concerning, among other things, our ongoing clinical trials and product development activities, regulatory approval of our products, the potential for future growth in our business, and our ability to achieve our key strategic, operational and financial goal. Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are, to different degrees, uncertain. Each forward- looking statement contained in this letter is subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statement. Applicable risks and uncertainties include, among others, the timing of regulatory approvals of our products; physician acceptance, endorsement, and use of our products; failure to achieve the anticipated benefits from approval of our products; the effect of regulatory actions; product liability claims; risks associated with international operations and expansion; and other business effects, including the effects of industry, economic or political conditions outside of the companys control. Investors should not place considerable reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this letter. Investors are encouraged to read our publicly available filings for a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements in this letter speak only as of the date of this release, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any of these statements.

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More people are choosing to die at home, instead of in a hospital – NBC News

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Home is now the most common place people are choosing to spend their final days of life, outpacing hospital deaths for the first time in more than half a century, according to a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings are reflective of an end-of-life trend that's been growing since the early 2000s.

From 2003 to 2017, the percentage of people dying at home increased from 23.8 percent to 30.7 percent, researchers found. At the same time, deaths that occurred in hospitals fell from 39.7 percent in 2003, to 29.8 percent in 2017. The research is based on an analysis of federal death certificate data from natural deaths during that time period.

The flip-flop may be attributed in part to growth in home hospice care, which is covered by Medicare, said study co-author Dr. Haider Warraich, associate director of the heart failure program at the VA Boston Healthcare System. Hospice provides pain management, along with emotional support and care to terminally ill patients nearing the end of their lives, as well as their families.

The number of Medicare beneficiaries receiving hospice care has steadily grown over the past decade. The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization reports there were 1.49 million such recipients in 2017, a 4.5 percent increase from the year before.

But the rise in at-home deaths also "reflects that perhaps we're able to honor more people's wishes and help them pass away in a place that's most familiar to them," said Warraich, who is also a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an instructor in cardiology at Harvard Medical School.

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Dying at home was less common among younger patients, the study found. That's likely because of two reasons: young people in life-threatening situations are more likely to undergo emergency medical interventions in a hospital, and insurance other than Medicare may not cover hospice care.

Racial minorities were also less likely to die at home, perhaps because of either health care access disparities or cultural preferences. Women, too, had lower odds of a home death, as they tend to be more likely than men to fill the caregiver role.

Dying at home may be preferred because of "the degree of control that you and your family have over how things are going to happen," said Harleah Buck, an associate professor in the College of Nursing at the University of South Florida.

Buck, who wasn't involved with the new study, said that people have a variety of cultural and spiritual needs related to death, often involving large gatherings of family members. "As soon as you step into a hospital, you lose the ability to pack 30 people into a room," Buck said. Many hospitals also have strict limits on young children and beloved pets as visitors.

But the rise in at-home deaths "also raises important questions about how well are we supporting not only those patients, but the caregivers who are now responsible for taking care of these patients," Warraich said.

A home death can be extraordinarily difficult for family members who are thrust into unfamiliar health care roles. "You're handing off the primary responsibility for the daily care of the patient from the medical system to the patient themselves and/or their informal caregivers," he said.

Patients at the end of life often have pain and shortness of breath two potentially upsetting experiences for loved ones to witness and treat.

Family members often feel "a sense of obligation" to take care of their loved ones," said Sharon Kozachik, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.

"Sometimes we ask family members to do medical tasks of care that we don't allow students to do without someone at their elbow," Kozachik said, "and it can be frightening and hard on families."

Kozachik and Buck said that's when hospice care can step in to assist in comforting patients, as well as caregivers.

"It's really important that people be able to die the way they want to in the environment where they would like, with the people and belongings that they cherish," Kozachik said.

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Erika Edwards is the health and medical news writer/reporter for NBC News and Today.

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More people are choosing to die at home, instead of in a hospital - NBC News

LW West Student Nominated For Congress Of Future Medical Leaders – New Lenox, IL Patch

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NEW LENOX, IL Margaret Randle, a sophomore at Lincoln-Way West will be a delegate to the Congress of Future Medical Leaders in Lowell, Massachusetts June 24-26, 2020. According to the district, Randle's nomination was signed by Dr. Mario Capecchi, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and the Science Director of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists to represent Illinois based on her academic achievement, leadership potential and determination to serve humanity in the field of medicine.

The Congress is an honors-only program for high school students who want to become physicians or go into medical research fields.

During the three-day Congress, the district said Randle will join students from across the country and hear Nobel Laureates and National Medal of Science Winners talk about leading medical research; be given advice from Ivy League and top medical school deans on what to expect in medical school; witness stories told by patients who are living medical miracles; be inspired by fellow teen medical science prodigies; and learn about cutting edge advances and the future in medicine and medical technology.

Randle's acceptance letter states: "This is a crucial time in America when we need more doctors and medical scientists who are even better prepared for a future that is changing exponentially. Focused, bright and determined students like Margaret Randle are our future and she deserves all the mentoring and guidance we can give her."

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Lighting the Way – Harvard Medical School

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Researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the University of Salento, both in Lecce, Italy, and Harvard Medical School in Boston have developed a new light-based method to capture and pinpoint the epicenter of neural activity in the brain.

The approach, described Oct. 7 inNature Methods, lays the foundation for novel ways tomap connections across different brain regionsan ability that can enable the design of devices to image various areas of the brain and even treat conditions that arise from malfunctions in cells inhabiting these regions, the researchers said.

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The work was led by Ferruccio Pisanello at IIT, Massimo De Vittorio at IIT and University of Salento, and Bernardo Sabatini, the Alice and Rodman W. Moorhead III Professor of Neurobiology in the Blavantik Institute at Harvard Medical School, and funded by the European Research Council and by the National Institutes of Health in the United States.

One of the central challenges in modern neuroscience is recording the exchange of information between different regions of the brain, as well as between different cell types. The new method overcomes this challenge by allowing the simultaneous collection of signals from various brain regions through the use of a tapered optical probe.

The study marks the first instance of successfully using light to decode the activity of specific neuronal populations as well as manipulation of different brain regions with the use of a single probe. The approach relies on bringing fluorescent molecules into specific nerve cells in order to track their electric activity and to measure the level of neurotransmittersmolecules that act as chemical messengers across neurons.

To achieve this, the team used an optical fibre in the shape of a narrow cone with a tip so thin and so precise that it is capable of capturing light from single neurons along regions as long as 2 millimetres (0.07 inches).

The researchers inserted the light-sensing probe inside the striatum, a region of the brain involved in planning movements, and used it to track the release of dopamine,a critical neurotransmitter involved in motor control which also plays a key role in the development ofdisorders like Parkinsons disease, schizophrenia and depression.

The device successfully captured neural activity in specific sub-regions of the striatum involved in the release of dopamine during specific behaviours.

The approach has effectively allowed scientists to capture how nerve signals travel in time and space and to gauge the concentration of specific neurotransmitters during specific actions. The method enriches researchers methodological repertoire and augments their ability to study the central nervous system and probe the molecular causes of neurological disorders.

Publication:doi.org/10.1038/s41592-019-0581-xRead-only free access copy of the manuscript:link

Other authors involved in the study included:Filippo Pisano, Marco Pisanello, Suk Joon Lee, Jaeeon Lee, Emanuela Maglie, Antonio Balena, Leonardo Sileo, Barbara Spagnolo, Marco Bianco, and Minsuk Hyun.

Funding:The work was supported by the European Research Council under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grants 677683 and 692943) and from the National Institutes of Health (grants U01NS0941901 and UF1NS108177-01).

Relevant disclosures:Sileo, De Vittorio, Sabatini and Pisanello are founders and hold private equity in OptogeniX, a company that develops, produces and sells technologies to deliver light into the brain. Tapered fibers commercially available from OptogeniX were used as tools in the research.

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Growing field of culinary medicine helps people get healthy by teaching them to cook healthier foods – WRVO Public Media

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There are connections between what we eat and how we feel, and the growing field of culinary medicine looks to capitalize on that link by joining the foundations of nutrition science with teaching people how to cook healthy, tasteful meals.

One North Country doctors office is taking it to the next level by offering patients cooking tips and techniques from a teaching kitchen thats part of their clinic.

Joe Wetterhahn, a family practice physician and his wife Gina, a physicians assistant, ditch their stethoscopes one night a month for a set of knives and cutting boards, teaching patients how to make tasty, healthy food.

The genesis of this whole thing?

"Gina one day in frustration saying 'nobody is getting better. Were spending time with people, doing the best we can, but the weight is going up, the blood sugars are going up, blood pressure is going up'," Wetterhahn said. "Its not just us, its obviously happening across the country. But the way to really impact that is at the plate."

So after a conference on culinary medicine introduced them to teaching kitchens, they pitched the idea to Samaritan Hospital in Watertown, which was building a new health center in Adams. And the hospital took it on, creating a restaurant grade fully equipped teaching kitchen right off their office.

"They invested into this to the point where you walk into our office, and you can sit down take out three cutting boards, grab a knife set and learn how to cook," said Wetterhahn.

So far, the program has grown to about 20 people per session. And Gina and Joe emphasize this is not like a visit to a nutritionist. While science does play a role in what dishes they teach, these classes are more practical.

"Heres something you could make and eat that will make you healthy, without talking about the milligrams of sodium, or the grams of fiber, or the things that dont really translate into how we put food on our plate," said Wetterhahn.

So instead of boiling squash, the 20 or so patients who come to the testing kitchen get a lesson in roasting veggies, like a delicata squash.

"With a delicata squash, the idea is that you eat the rind. Just pick it up and eat it. Because the rind is delate," the Wetterhahns said during a recent class.

Joe and Gina make up their menus the morning of class. Most are based on the Mediterranean diet. They do all the shopping at a local grocery store. So far they say there havent been any cooking busts, but they do admit, one of the biggest challenges is getting folks to try fish.

"Theres this hesitancy because of cooking fish that it wont turn out, or Im not going to like it and its expensive and I dont want to take a chance with it. So we try to integrate fish and seafood a lot in our menus," Wetterhahn said.

A recent class though turned some fish doubters into cod lovers.

"Sometimes certain fishes are fishy. Fishes are fishy. But cod is dense and not fishy," Gina said.

Wetterhahn said the field of culinary medicine is growing. There are teaching kitchens in tech companies like Google. Some medical school are offering classes in teaching kitchens. But hed like to see it in more communities like his, rural populations where studies show there are greater rates of obesity and diets higher in fat.

"The challenge is, again, getting it into areas like northern New York. Getting it into more rural areas, instead of having pockets in urban areas where you have a medical school and it doesnt filter out beyond that," Wetterhahn said.

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School of Medicine – University of Mississippi Medical Center

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The University of Mississippi School of Medicine trains physicians to deliver skilled, equitable health care to all citizens of Mississippi, the region and nation; this is the essential goal of the medical school.

The program is accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education.

Along the way, students who complete the four-year course of study leading to the Doctor of Medicine degree absorb the schools core values, including respect for the range of diversity reflected in all people.

The School of Medicines pledge is to educate physicians who are compassionate and considerate, and whose numbers meet the health care needs of the state, including those of the underserved. These professionals are mindful of the health problems and disparities faced by the people of Mississippi. They understand that medical education is a lifelong commitment.

As part of the states only academic health science campus, the school plays an important role in deepening the body of knowledge in medicine and science for the state, nation and world, and in making health care more available and valuable for patients of various backgrounds.

Appreciation and respect for the traditions, customs and cultures of a diverse state is a must if the schools students, faculty, administration and staff are to fulfill the schools mission. This diversity embraces demographic attributes, personal attributes, varied life experiences, and much more.

Diversity and inclusion enrich the learning environment and better prepare physicians to offer quality care to everyone.

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School of Medicine - University of Mississippi Medical Center

Caught in the Act – Harvard Medical School

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Its like the parable about the blindfolded men and the elephantonly instead of an elephant, its an enzyme.

For decades, researchers have groped at a family of proteins called Rafs. These proteinsincluding A-Raf, B-Raf and C-Raftransmit signals that control proliferation, differentiation and survival in every cell in the body.

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Raf proteins, especially B-Raf, are also well-known cancer drivers. Hence Rafs full name: rapidly accelerated fibrosarcoma. Faulty control of their activity can cause melanoma; thyroid, colorectal, non-small cell lung and pediatric brain cancers; and other malignancies. Two FDA-approved drugs treat cancer by inhibiting B-Raf.

Given B-Rafs critical roles in health and disease, scientists have been keen to understand its structure. Theyve used genetics, chemistry, biology and other scientific approaches, but they havent been able to piece together a complete picture of Raf.

People had poked and prodded Raf for more than 30 years, but we could only see parts of it, saidMichael J. Eck, professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Now, thanks to work by Eck and colleagues, researchers can see the whole enzyme.

As reported online this month inNature, Ecks team at last captured high-resolution images of B-Raf in its inactive or off state and in several active or on positions.

The findings clarify how B-Raf functions normally in the body as well as what happens when mutations alter its shape and lead to cancer.

The work should help researchers seeking to develop safer, more effective cancer drugs that lock onto particular forms of the enzyme like custom-made puzzle pieces.

Illuminating the huge, unsolved problem of B-Rafs structure could have major importance for understanding its biology and for drug discovery, said Eck.

Its exciting to see something no one has seen before, he added. Now that we can look at the thing, we can tell a coherent story that integrates many previous studies.

Protein whisperer

Several factors made the discovery possible.

First, Ecks team didnt try to study B-Raf alone but instead prepared it as a complex with two additional proteins: a known regulator of Raf with the catchy name of 14-3-3, plus MEK, the next link in the Raf signaling chain.

MEK was the crucial missing piece for solving the structure, said Eck, who is co-senior author of the study along withHyesung Jeon, research associate at HMS and a senior scientist at Dana-Farber. MEK is not just the next step in the signaling cascade, its also key for keeping Raf turned off.

Second, HMS research associateEunyoung Park, a senior scientist in the Eck Lab and first author of the study, served as a protein whisperer who tamed B-Raf, coaxing it into those well-behaved complexes with 14-3-3 and MEK, said Eck.

Third, researchers hadnt been able to determine B-Rafs structure using traditional methods such as X-ray crystallography. Advances incryo-electron microscopy, which visualizes molecules at near-atomic resolution, finally opened the door.

The Raf that rocks the cradle

At long last, the structures revealed themselves.

Like a snowman with a rocker base, the complex in its inactive or off state includes MEK on top, B-Raf in the middle and 14-3-3 on the bottom, cradle-shaped.

The team showed how 14-3-3 normally blocks B-Raf from binding with other B-Rafs, keeping it shut off as a default. When an incoming cell signal calls B-Raf to action, however, 14-3-3 swings aside and allows two B-Raf/MEK complexes to form a pair.

In doing so, 14-3-3 exposes a region of B-Raf that draws the complex to the cell membrane. There, B-Raf gets activated and in turn activates and releases MEK to send its growth-promoting signal.

The structural snapshots also revealed how mutations subvert this normal activation process by causing the B-Raf switch to get stuck in the on position.

The discovery isnt without precedent in the cancer biology world.

Weve seen this in other cancer-causing enzymes weve studied, said Eck.

The results could lead to improved treatments for people with cancers driven by dysfunctional B-Raf.

Current drugs that target mutated B-Raf are used to treat malignant melanoma, but they sometimes also stimulate the growth of new skin cancers by paradoxically activating the normal form of the enzyme. Patients then need to take a second drug, which can cause serious side effects.

The structure gives us ideas about new approaches for drug discovery, said Eck.

His group also plans to uncover more details about B-Raf activation in both healthy cells and cancers.

Funding and authorship

Additional coauthors are Shaun Rawson, Kunhua Li, Byeong-Won Kim, Scott Ficarro, Gonzalo Gonzalez-Del Pino, Humayun Sharif and Jarrod Marto.

This work was supported in part by the PLGA fund at the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research and the National Institutes of Health (grants P50CA165962, P01CA154303 and R50CA221830). Cryo-EM imaging was carried out at the University of Massachusetts Medical School Cryo-EM Core Facility and theHarvard Cryo-EM Center for Structural Biology.

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Caught in the Act - Harvard Medical School

Instructor at CU Medical School mocks East High cheerleaders in splits video – 9NEWS.com

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One medical professional is defending what we see in the cheerleading video.

Next with Kyle Clark , KUSA 8:36 PM. MDT August 25, 2017

Tweet screenshot

DENVER - A senior instructor at the University of Colorado Medical School took to Twitter to mock teenage cheerleaders who were seen screaming in pain while being forced into the splits.

The 9Wants to Know team was the first to report on the incident on Wednesday. The video shows cheerleaders from East High School in Denver crying as their coach - OzellWilliams, who's known for his tumbling at Broncos and CU football games - and fellow teammates hold them in position.

RELATED:Videos show East High cheerleaders repeatedly forced into splits, police investigating

RELATED:East High coach let go from previous job over forced splits

Dr. Jim Mosher, whose specialty is listed as Obstetrics and Gynecology on the CU website,tweeted to Kyle Clark when the story broke that:

Screenshot

Every athlete goes through some difficult pain. If you cannot deal with it mommy is always at home.

"Every athlete goes through some difficult pain. If you cannot deal with it mommy is always at home."

The University of Colorado told Next that Dr. Mosher was not speaking for the university or the medical school on his personal Twitter account when he posted that message.

The doctor has since changed his account name, and he declined to comment when we asked.

--

UPDATE: Dr. Mosher reached out to Next on Twitter Thursday evening to issue an apology. He writes:

I'm SINCERELY sorry for that tweet. I hadn't read the news story. I apologize for any pain caused by this uninformed, unsympathetic comment.

#heynext Tweets

2017 KUSA-TV

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New Jersey Medical School – Wikipedia

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New Jersey Medical School (NJMS)also known as Rutgers New Jersey Medical Schoolis a graduate medical school of Rutgers University that is part of the division of Biomedical and Health Sciences. NJMS is the oldest school of medicine in New Jersey. The school of medicine was founded in 1954 as the Seton Hall College of Medicine and Dentistry, established under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, in Jersey City, New Jersey. On August 6, 1954, the College was incorporated as a legal entity separate from Seton Hall University, but with an interlocking Board of Trustees. The first class of 80 students was admitted to the four-year MD program in September 1956, becoming only the sixth medical school in the New York City metropolitan area. In 1965, the institution was acquired by the State of New Jersey, renamed the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry (NJCMD), and relocated to Newark, New Jersey. With the passing of the Medical and Dental Education Act of 1970, signed into law by Governor William T. Cahill on June 16, the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (CMDNJ) was created, merging NJCMD with the two-year medical school established at Rutgers University in 1961, under a single board of trustees.

With the creation of the CMDNJ, the medical school adopted its title the New Jersey Medical School. In 1981, legislation signed on December 10 by Governor Byrne established CMDNJ as the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). NJMS served as one of five regional campuses that constitute the UMDNJ health science institution. On June 28, 2012 the New Jersey state legislature passed a bill that dissolved the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and merged most of its schools including New Jersey Medical School with Rutgers University forming a new Rutgers Division of Biomedical and Health Sciences effective July 1, 2013. With a cohesive student body, each class consisting of approximately 170 students, NJMS is experiencing impressive growth on a number of fronts. Robert L. Johnson is the current Dean.

In 2004, the school received $104 million in extramural grants supporting basic, clinical and translational research. New Jersey Medical School is also home to the Global Tuberculosis Institute, The Institute for Ophthalmology and Visual Science, and the Center for Emerging and Reemerging Pathogens. New Jersey Medical School is a charter member of the New Jersey Stem Cell Research and Education Foundation. The Summer Student Research Program provides students with stipends to conduct research in the laboratories of NJMS faculty. Each year, more than 100 first- and second-year students, as well as prospective students considering medical school, participate in the program, which has a strong emphasis on cancer research and heart, lung and blood research. NJMS faculty have contributed significantly to medical science breakthroughs including the development of the worldwide standard in knee replacement, the New Jersey Knee; a patented method for the early detection of Lyme disease; the identification of pediatric AIDS and the development of drug-therapy to reduce the likelihood of pre-natal transmission; and proof of the connection between smoking and cancer resulting in the warning message printed on cigarette packages.

New Jersey Medical Schools core teaching hospital, The University Hospital, is located on campus. It is home to a Level I Trauma Center, the busiest in the state, and one of the nations most active liver transplant programs. The 504-bed facility is also highly regarded for its Comprehensive Stroke Center, the New Jersey Cardiovascular Institute (NJCI), the cochlear Implant Program, a neurosurgical intensive care unit and a special Brain Tumor Program, the Neurological Institute of New Jersey, a federally designated spinal cord injury program and The University Center for Bloodless Surgery and Medicine. University Hospital is also the states single largest provider of charity care. Approximately 500 residents are pursuing advanced clinical training at University Hospital in 18 accredited programs.

Other major affiliated teaching sites include Hackensack University Medical Center, Morristown Medical Center, and the East Orange Veterans Affairs Hospital.

Admission to NJMS is highly selective and competitive. NJMS selects its students on the basis of academic excellence, leadership qualities, demonstrated compassion for others and broad extracurricular experiences. One hundred and seventy students enrolled in the class of 2012, selected from over 5,000 applicants. All applicants must be either permanent residents or citizens of the United States, meet specific course requirements, and take the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Deans of NJMS:

Charles L. Brown, MD (195559)

James E. McCormack, MD (196066)

Arthur J. Lewis, MD (1966)

Desmond Bonnycastle, MD, PhD (acting 1967)

Rulon Rawson, MD (196772)

Harold Kaminetsky, MD (acting dean and dean, 197274)

Stanley S. Bergen, Jr., MD (acting 1974)

Vincent Lanzoni, MD, PhD (197587)

Stuart D. Cook, MD (acting 1987-89)

Ruy V. Loureno, MD (December 1989-June 2000)

Joel A. DeLisa, MD, MS (interim July 2000-December 2000)

Russell T. Joffe, MD (January 2001-September 2005)

Robert L. Johnson, MD (October 2005 to present)

Coordinates: 404421N 741124W / 40.73924N 74.190111W / 40.73924; -74.190111

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New Jersey Medical School - Wikipedia

THE COST OF MEDICAL SCHOOL– Is Med School Worth it? – YouTube

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One of the most frequent question I get is the cost of going to medical school and if med school is worth it or not. In this video, I compare the cost of private med schools to public medical schools, talk about the how long medical school takes to complete and finally other opportunity costs or things that med students miss out on by attending medical school.

Hope you guys find this video useful!

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The first African-American woman to graduate from medical school in the US is buried in an unmarked grave in Hyde Park – Universal Hub

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The Friends of the Hyde Park Branch Library have started raising funds for a gravestone for Rebecca Lee Crumpler, who graduated from the New England Female Medical College in Boston in 1864 and whose body currently lies in an unmarked grave in Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park.

The Friends are hoping to raise between $3,000 and $5,000 for a tombstone for Crumpler. They've collected some info on Crumpler, of whom no known image survives: Born in Delaware in 1831, she grew up in Pennsylvania, but she eventually moved to the Boston area, where she took classes at West Newton English and Classical School and settled in Charlestown. In 1864, she earned her medical degree. After serving time following the Civil War with the Freedmen's Bureau in Richmond, VA, she moved back to the Boston area with her husband, Arthur, and eventually settled in Hyde Park - near the cemetery where she is now buried.

In 1883, she write a book of medical advice for "mothers, nurses, and all who may desire to mitigate the afflictions of the human race," A Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts.

Donations towards a tombstone can be made to:

Friends of the Hyde Park LibraryFor: Crumpler Fund35 Harvard Avenue, Hyde Park, MA 02136

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4 questions medical students are asking on the COVID-19 pandemic – American Medical Association

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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused much uncertainty at all levels of education. Medical educationparticularly at the medical school levelis no exception.

The pandemic hit during a time of educational transition, as final-year medical students are preparing for residency, third-year medical students begin exploring their options for residency applications and preclinical students become ready to work with patients. With students being restricted in their contact with patients during clinical clerkships through at least the end of March, all those transitions may appear to be in flux.

The only thing we can honestly say right now, because the situation is so fluid, is that students have to have some trust in the dedication of their faculty and administration and organizations such as the accrediting bodies and licensing boards, said Kimberly Lomis, MD, the AMAs vice president for undergraduate medical education innovations. We will make this work eventually. All of these organizations are working actively to think through the downstream implications for students and to build systems to accommodate accordingly.

The AMA has developed aCOVID-19 resource centeras well as aphysicians guide to COVID-19to give doctors a comprehensive place to find the latest resources and updates from the Centers forDiseaseControl and PreventionandtheWorld Health Organization. TheAMAs COVID-19 FAQwill help physicians address patient concerns and offers advice on key issues such as how to optimize PPE supply.

In terms of affected milestones and how medical students may reach them, Dr. Lomis and other stakeholders offered some insight.

Learning the science and art of medicine is a graduated process, meaning that whether its assessment or experiences, medical students often have to complete one milestone before they can embark on another. With clerkships being suspended at schools, per the recommendation of theAssociation of American Medical Colleges, there are fears that medical students could stall.

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) is giving schools significant leeway to get creative with helping students accomplish required tasks. The LCME has developed guidance for schools. Changes that are possible could involve altering the delivery mechanism, such as taking classes like anatomy online, or changing the structure of a school schedulerepurposing elective time to ensure that core requirements are completed, changing the length of clerkships and changing assessment formats.

For students who are on the cusp of graduation and just matched with a residency program, that flexibility is key; some students may still have some required coursework remaining.

A local [alternative] response to allow them to finish is very viable, Dr. Lomis said of how schools will approach fourth-year medical students. Each school will work diligently to enable students they believe are qualified to indeed graduate on time.

For second- and third-year medical students, Steps 1 and 2 of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) are key events. The National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) has put the USMLE Step 2 exams Clinical Skills portion on hold, while Prometric, the organization that operates the testing centers at which the exams are administered, has announced that its facilities are closed for 30 days. For affected students, the NBME has offered to waive fees for eligibility period extensions and testing region changes.

These closures are unlikely to affect second-year medical students preparing for the Step 1 exam. If closures extend, with most students taking the exam in late April and May, that development could have a significant impact on when students take the exam.

Many medical schools give students dedicated study time in the weeks before the exam takes place. During those weeks, when possible, its best to try to stick to your study schedule, according to Christopher Cimino, MD, chief medical officer, Kaplan Medical.

Dr. Cimino also said students are going to have to acknowledge their realities.

No study plan is going to survive distractions, he said. The coronavirus is a huge distraction. Everybody has family members and knows people over 60. You need to recognize that thats a real thing.

Medical students want in on the action, but with clinical rotations suspended, opportunities for direct patient care are limited.

Even without direct patient contact, there are still areas in which students can add value for a health system. Some health systems, for instance, are using telehealth to answer patient questions.

Jeffanie Wu, a first-year medical student at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and an AMA member, says she and her classmates have worked with their administration to find ways they can offer their services. Two volunteer projects have emerged in recent days: one to help offer child care services to hospital staff, and another to work on a hotline that helps patients screen for symptoms of COVID-19 before they consider going to the hospital.

Wu has signed up to work at the hotline once it is up and running.

Were trying to help out in any way we can, she said. We are trying to decrease the fear thats out there right now. By talking to people about the symptoms of COVID-19 and telling them what the virus is. Providing that information can be a service.

With patient contact being suspended, students are not doing traditional rotation activities right now. The same can be said of visiting or away rotations. Typically done early in the fourth year of training, these might be key for current third-year medical students who view them as potential residency program auditions.

Away rotations require students to adapt to a new health system, and those systems are now under significant strain.

If we do get local clinical options open soon I suspect that [away rotations] would be slow to follow until systems feel like they are back to normal, Dr. Lomis said. The advantage to starting up local rotations is that you have the medical students who know your system and can contribute and add value in a number of ways while better protecting their own personal safety. I anticipate GME [graduate medical education] programs will develop distance alternatives to interact with applicants in meaningful ways.

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4 questions medical students are asking on the COVID-19 pandemic - American Medical Association

Med Students Aren’t Sitting Out the Fight Against the Coronavirus – Mother Jones

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On Saturday, March 14, Avery Thompson and 650 other medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, received an email: Clinical classes were going online and planned hours in the hospital were being put on ice. The spread of the novel coronavirus posed too big a threat for courses to continue in person. In conversations with friends, she said, We were all experiencing similar frustration at feeling like we werent able to do very much. Within hours, the second year medical student received another message. This time, from her peers. It linked to a Google Doc, where medical students and pupils from other UCSF programspharmaceuticals, PhD studentswere drumming up ways to make themselves useful to the medical community. Within days, almost 200 students offered help, 120 from the medical school alone.

It really just sort of snowballed, said Hope Schwartz, a first year medical student at UCSF. And people started reaching out and coming up with other great ideas. Some suggested running a blood drive, others planned to redraft public health information for the multi-lingual San Francisco Bay Area, and track down other industries that use personal protective equipmentconstruction companies and nail salons.

Students have had the bandwidth to plan out a lot more, Dr. John Davis, associate dean of curriculum at the medical school said. They mobilized immediately, as soon as Covid-19 became an issue.

As the official number of coronavirus infections begin to skyrocketon Monday, it was 35,000; 70,000 on Thursday, and by Friday afternoon there were over 100,000 casesthe nations healthcare apparatus has reorganized itself to face the pandemic head on. Non-essential surgeries are being cancelled, and hospitals are pleading with the public to abide by CDC recommendations of social distancing and hand-washing in an effort to prevent overwhelming medical services. For medical schools, still in the middle of the academic year, clinical rotations have ground to a halt. Many instructors are too busy on the frontlines to teach, and the presence of untrained medical students could worsen supply shortages or accidentally spread the disease. Meanwhile, schools have tried to react to a quickly-changing health emergency without losing sight of their responsibility to educate future doctors.

These new conditionshave fundamentallychanged the lives of the nations 30,000 medical students in two ways. First, course curriculums have reshaped themselves to fit into a world disrupted by the pandemic. Second, the coronavirus has offered studentsan opportunity to provide ancillary support for frontline healthcare workers. Across the country, students are organizing themselves to meet the specific needs of the medical community in creative ways: from babysitting for nurses to 3D printing personal protective equipment, like masks.

For many,the crisis goes to the heart of why theywanted to be doctors in the first place. I do feel that medical students go to medical school mostly because we want be helpful, says Orly Farber, a third year medical student at Stanford Medical School. We dont write that in our essays because its too simplistic a reason, but its reality. At Stanford, medical students are providing childcare, running errands, and going grocery shopping for the doctors and nurses whose days are fully devoted to fighting the virus. Farber thinks its possible their role may even be expanded by being asked to take clinical notes, make phone calls to patients, and help with orders, all tasks can be handled remotely.

In other schools, where shortages of equipment are also a concern, students are turning to technological solutions. With the materials necessary for homemade masks in short supply, students at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have started 3D printing face shields, which can be mass produced. Theyre cheap and easy and the most extreme thing youd need, says Diana Dayal, a fourth year student at UNCSM. If anything, were making the more robust product. Some of the 170 student volunteers from UNCSM and adjacent programs are also working as hall monitors, helping medical workers properly don and doxput on and take offprotective equipment to prevent contamination. Some Rutgers students are running a hotline at the New Jersey Poison Control Center to set the record straight for callers whove been inundated with misinformation about the pandemic.

For the public, even the right information can be difficult to interpret. Students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine are collaborating with their counterparts at New York University and the Pittsburgh Center for Autistic Advocacy to rewrite Centers for Disease Control guidelines. Were working as a collective effort to take these CDC guidelines and distill them down to different reading levels, so theyre accessible for a broader audience, said Ben Zuchelkowski, a fourth year medical student at Pittsburgh. Once the new guidelines are ready, he hopes his colleagues can disseminate them nationally.

All of the students I spoke to emphasizedthat they were able to expand beyond their institutions to collaborate with others around the country.Across messaging applications like Slack, video conferencing services like Zoom, plus Twitter and Google Drive, student bodies have stayed intouch. Were sharing ideas with each other, doing conference calls once we make a connection, says Zuchelkowski. Its really been a robust organizational effort nationally. Theres even Google file called Schmeddit, where everyone can keep up to date on which programs are closed or have affiliated hospitals with confirmed Covid-19 patients.

Meanwhile, medical schools are quickly rewriting curriculums to lean on the same remote communication tools. For students at UCSF, classroom courses rapidly moved to distance and remote learning methods, said Dr. Davis. Those are things we could deploy quick. Its the same story at most other medical schools. But thats where the similarities end. We dont have a nationally standardized curriculum, he said. Every medical school has, for all intents and purposes, its own curriculum. Each interruption in clinic and classroom activities has to be contextualizedand thats where real complexities occur.

Those complexities become even more fraught in the clinical setting, where students spend the majority of their thirdand some of their fourthyears. Given the severity of the pandemic, clinical rotationswhen students experience aspects of the profession, like surgery or primary care, in 4 to 8-week incrementshave been cancelled for now.

So, how do you teach medical students to become doctors when their presence in a hospital is a health risk? Theres no clear sense of how this school is going to deal with it, said Krunal Amin, a second year medical student at Duke University School of Medicine, where classes have been cancelled until June 15. At UCSF, Dr. Davis said faculty are discussing shifting clinical education from being time-based to competency-based, allowing for a bit more freedom. In cases where thats not possible, hes proposed uncoupling courses. Instead of classroom instruction and hospital hours happening simultaneously, for instance, the first comes now, the latter after the virus subsides. Avery Thompson, the UCSF second year, said Theyre making the best out of a pretty bad situation, and I do appreciate that.

Still, not everything can simply be rescheduled. Dayal says one crucial exam, which third years take to determine where theyll spend their first years as doctors, has been cancelled. This week, most schools typically have Match Day, a celebration where fourth years learn what that determination is. This year, celebrations moved from auditoriums illuminated in camera flash to email inboxes.

Graduation ceremonies have been cancelled, but some medical schools in Boston and New York have enlisted their fourth year students to start practicing. On Tuesday, NYUs medical programsent out an emailannouncingthat it would graduate some of its fourth year students three months earlier than planned, so they could join the healthcare workforce prior to the typical June 1 starting date. New York City faces the highest concentration of infections in the nation, and NYU University Medical Center is at the center of it all.

That need is trickling down to younger students, too. Last week, North Carolinas Department of Health and Human Serviceswhich has COVID-19 test samples but not enough technicians to process themsought out students with lab experience who could help expedite the work. Similarly, the Allegheny County Medical Reserve Corps has reached out to students to help bolster numbers.

I feel in the coming weeks were going to need backups to assist an overwhelmed healthcare workforce, said Farber, at Stanford Medicine. Medical students can help reinforce the frontline.

The reality of being in the midst of a deadly pandemic, with many healthcare workers struggling to get basic supplies, and no clear end in sight has created demands that are daunting to even seasoned physicians. I asked Diana Dayal, the UNCSM student, if she ever second guessed her choice to pursue medicine. Absolutely not, she said. I think its inspiring to have a skill setto really be there for people at their darkest time, even if on a pandemic scale.

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Med Students Aren't Sitting Out the Fight Against the Coronavirus - Mother Jones

Another Step Toward Controversial Merger of Med Schools – NJ Spotlight

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Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Chancellor Brian Strom made a case for the merger in a Jan. 31 letter to the executive committee of Rutgers University Senate.

A controversial proposal to merge the two Rutgers University medical schools into a single entity spread over two cities 30 miles apart may be gaining momentum, despite concerns among some faculty and staff about the process and potential risks involved.

The Rutgers University Senate is scheduled today to consider permitting leaders at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) in New Brunswick and New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) in Newark to start exploring what is needed to unify these colleges under a single mission and governance structure with one educational system, research agenda and clinical practice.

Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Chancellor Brian Strom, who oversees both medical schools, made a case for the merger in a Jan. 31 letter to the executive committee of the senate, a legislative body with some regulatory functions. Strom said a combined school would increase Rutgers access to research dollars and provide new opportunities for students, scientists and patients. Faculty and students at the two schools treat patients at teaching hospitals, clinics and private offices in both cities.

I believe we have the opportunity to pursue a bold and transformational change in medical education at Rutgers University that may prove to be an influential model across the United States, the RBHS chancellor wrote. He also stressed that if the schools were combined, one campus would not be a satellite or subordinate of the other.

In his letter, Strom underscored that no final decision has been made, but he asked for the senates input before faculty committees are appointed to dig into the mechanics of a merger; it is not clear how long the senate executive committee will take to make a decision. His letter does float a possible name for the combined entity Rutgers Medical School and hints that it could attract a transformational philanthropic gift.

If the Senate panel does give its go-ahead, and the faculty can find a way to make it work, the final decision would essentially be left to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), a national committee that accredits medical schools, according to the letter. Stroms team has already been in touch with the liaison committee about the potential change, which could result in the largest medical school in the U.S. (Each program now includes more than 700 students and thousands of faculty and staff.)

Thus, my request to the Senate is to approve the merger now, with the explicit recognition that we are continuing a process where the end result may be the integration of RWJMS and NJMS into a single accredited school, the final arbiter of course being the LCME. However, an irrevocable decision to merge has not yet been made, pending that work by the faculty, he wrote.

The process outlined in Stroms letter raised concerns for some medical school faculty and staff, who believe there should be more transparency around the planning and greater input from the Rutgers community and the public. And elected officials representing Newark are particularly concerned about the impact any merger would have on clinical care there, including at the citys University Hospital, north Jerseys only Level 1 trauma center.

The merger of Rutgers medical schools should not take place without input from the public, bargaining with unionized workers and oversight from New Jersey regulators, said Debbie White, a nurse and president of the Health Professionals and Allied Employees union, which represents close to 1,000 clinicians and other staff at the two schools.

New Jersey made a commitment to preserve the medical school in Newark and promote the institution as a premier teaching facility. We must hold Rutgers and the state to that commitment before allowing a merger to move the future of health care in a direction that puts Newark in the back seat, White said.

Diomedes Tsitouras, executive director of the American Association of University Professors chapter that represents some 1,500 faculty in Rutgers biomedical program, has urged the chancellor to take his time with any decision, especially given all the other changes the schools are currently experiencing. (Some of the AAUP units are engaged in contract disputes with Rutgers.)

The (university) senate should put a hold on this until details can be figured out, Tsitouras said. Theres no rush to go to the LCME.

But Strom and other Rutgers officials insist that there is now a unique opportunity for change. Our intention is to facilitate a bold transformation of medical education at Rutgers and to set a new standard for the country, said Associate Vice Chancellor Zach Hosseini, who handles marketing and communications. To do that, we are engaging with key partners, like the Rutgers University Senate and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), to ensure we follow the necessary and appropriate steps to explore the transformation that the committee envisioned, he added, referring to a faculty panel report unveiled last week.

The current system is the result of former Gov. Chris Christies reform in 2012 that dismantled the former University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in Newark, and restructured medical education across the state. That led to the creation of NJMS in Newark and RWJMS in New Brunswick, which were united under Rutgers umbrella biomedical program with five other health-related colleges. (The reform also shifted an osteopathic program in Camden from Rutgers to Rowan University.)

In recent years, the two Rutgers medical schools have grown closer, collaborating on a number of clinical institute programs, and they now share a single leader. In January 2019, NJMS Dean Dr. Robert L. Johnson was also appointed interim dean at the New Brunswick school RWJMS when the previous dean departed. The two schools are also combining their graduate medical education programs. In 2017, RBHS signed an agreement with RWJBarnabas Health, one of the states largest provider networks, to improve the universitys clinical practice.

Strom has suggested that integrating the two medical schools would enable the states university to attract more research funding and scientific expertise, while making the program more attractive to potential students, health care employers, and other partners. In his letter to the senate panel, he notes that Rutgers is now one of only five universities in the country with more than one medical school, and the other four are separated by hundreds not dozens of miles.

Further, this separation hurts our national rankings substantially, since our grant portfolio, a large part of the ranking, is divided between the schools, Strom wrote.

To explore the future options, Strom created a 12-member commission (six from each school) to study various scenarios, from maintaining the status quo to a full merger with two co-equal campuses. In a report distributed last week, the committee focused on two choices: remaining as two schools, but with greater collaboration, or combining into one entity. It did not endorse one option over the other, but warned that any change would be costly, complicated and require significant planning and stakeholder input.

Strom insists that no decision has been made in his letter to the senate panel, but in framing the work to come, he focuses almost exclusively on efforts needed to explore and carry out a merger. There is no mention of a process to determine if that path is preferable to more limited collaboration.

Based on the recommendations of the (12-member) Committee, our next steps are to continue and expand careful and thorough deliberations on the potential structure, governance, curriculum, research, and clinical care of a future combined Rutgers Medical School. (The final name of a combined school remains to be decided), Strom wrote. Incidentally, a worksheet provided to the senate panel included the same potential name and noted that a merger would not require additional funding, at least early on.

If this change is viewed as sufficiently transformational, we may be presented with an opportunity for a potentially transformational philanthropic gift, he wrote. No additional information on the potential gift was available Thursday afternoon.

Please consider accepting this process and with it the possibility that we will completely integrate the two medical schools into a single model school and the potential to create the brightest future for academic medicine, one that will serve our students, patients, and communities while advancing our scholarship, research, and the profession of medicine, Strom wrote.

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Another Step Toward Controversial Merger of Med Schools - NJ Spotlight

Ask the Authors: Dr. Mohammadreza Hojat Speaks on the Erosion of Empathy Exhibited by Medical Students – DocWire News

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Last week, DocWire News covered a study which suggests that medical students lose empathy as they progress through medical school.

We spoke with lead researcher Mohammadreza Hojat, PhD, who detailed what prompted him to undertake this study. As a psychologist by academic training, I became interested in exploring the effects of human relationships in health and illness, said Dr. Hojat, of the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University.

This interest shifted to a more specific area of patient-doctor relationship when I started a career in medical education research about 40 years ago. The questions of why some health professionals are more capable than others to form empathic relationship with patients, what are the factors that contribute to the development of empathy, and what are the outcomes of empathic engagement in patient care prompted me to search for answers.

The study comprised 10,751 medical students (3,616 first-year, 2,764 second-year, 2,413 third-year, and 1,958 fourth-year students) enrolled in 41 campuses of DO-granting medical schools in the US while comparing preexisting data from students of MD-granting medical schools. All participants were asked to complete a web-based survey at the end of the 2017-2018 academic year.

The results showed a decline in empathy scores between medical students in the pre-clinical years (first-and-second year students) and medical students in the clinical years (third-and-fourth year students). Furthermore, the researchers observed that the pattern of empathy decline was similar among DO students, but the magnitude was less pronounced.

The findings of the study raise a red flag for medical education leaders, said Dr. Hojat. Among implications of the findings is a call for the development and implementation of targeted educational programs in medical schools to enhance and sustain empathy in physicians-in-training.

Dr. Hojat noted that the study did have a limitation its design. As a cross-sectional study, the baseline empathy at the start of medical school may be different for students in different years, thus variation in empathy in different years could be attributed to the baseline differences, and not necessarily to changes during medical school.

He feels that a more desirable study design would be a longitudinal study, in which a cohort of students is followed up (for four years) during medical school and changes in their empathy scores are compared as the cohort progresses through medical school.

Moving forward, to attenuate this limitation, Dr. Hojat is currently undertaking a five-year longitudinal study of a national cohort of osteopathic medical students from the 2019-2020 entering class. He plans to follow (the students) from matriculation to graduation to examine yearly changes in empathy, reasons for such changes, and to explore approaches to enhance and sustain their empathy.

This Project in Osteopathic Medical Education and Empathy (POMEE), according to Dr. Hojat, is sponsored by the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM), the American Osteopathic Association (AOA), and the Cleveland Clinic in collaboration with the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University.

Dr. Hojat added that: In addition to examining empathy, we plan to study changes in orientation toward holistic, integrative, and patient-centered care, attitudes toward interprofessional collaboration, lifelong learning, and burnout experiences as the cohort progresses through medical school.

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Ask the Authors: Dr. Mohammadreza Hojat Speaks on the Erosion of Empathy Exhibited by Medical Students - DocWire News