Perspectives
A Word From the President
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Core Competencies and the Heart of Learning
by Darrell G. Kirch, MD, AAMC President and CEO
Viewpoints
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Training Future Physicians to Address Opioid Crisis
by Robert J. Sokol, MD, President, and Kevin Kunz, MD, Executive Vice President of the Addiction Medicine Foundation
The country is struggling to reverse the devastating opioid epidemic, which has its roots in many places and requires a collective response across multiple sectors. For their part, medical schools and teaching hospitals are actively working to address the crisis in their communities. But to be maximally effective, we must ensure these efforts go beyond academic medicine’s traditional commitment to increasing knowledge and finding best practices we can “import” to our own environments. We must ensure we are translating that knowledge into real change in the community.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Humanism Increasingly Important in a Changing Health Care Landscape
by Richard I. Levin, MD, President and CEO of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation
As the academic medicine community faces new demands, maintaining a human connection with our patients is more crucial than ever.
The use of electronic health records (EHRs) has skyrocketed—in less than a decade, the number of hospitals adopting the technology surged from fewer than 10% in 2008 to nearly 84%, in 2015 according to federal data. But adoption is only the first step health care providers must take to harness the full power of EHRs to improve people’s health.
“We’re in the infancy of using EHRs to improve patient care,” said Keith Horvath, MD, senior director for clinical transformation at the AAMC. “Obviously, adoption was the first step that needed to happen, and it basically took analog paper charts into digital form. Another main goal was to improve billing and collection—it’s been a good tool from that perspective, too. But it hasn’t yet been optimized for improving quality of care.”
Although more hospitals are using EHRs, a 2016 study reported mixed results in efforts to leverage EHRs to improve patient outcomes. To help spur such innovation, the AAMC teamed up with the Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation to identify researchers on the cutting edge of such work. In 2013, the foundation awarded grants to two promising EHR projects: one directed at boosting provider capacity and another targeting improved clinical care.
Academic Medicine in the News
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Scientists Ease Blindness With Video Goggles
Scientists and engineers are a long way from creating a visual prosthesis that works as well as a real human eye, let alone a superhuman one. But two Stanford Medicine research teams are making steady progress in what was once the realm of science fiction.
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Strengthening Providers' Emotional Reserves
UCHeath University of Colorado Hospital is addressing issues with provider resiliency and emotional stress with the recently formed Resiliency Education and Support Team (REST). The team is made up of six staffers who are trained to help reduce emotional stress in the hospital's Emergency Department, and inpatient and intensive care units.
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Students Learn Life Lessons in Honoring Those Who Give
Each year, the Medical College of Wisconsin Anatomical Gift Registry (AGR) receives about 150 body donations to support the medical education of future physicians. Since 2011, the AGR, under the direction of Todd Hoagland, PhD, professor of cell biology, neurobiology, and anatomy, has held the annual AGR Memorial Service to provide next of kin with closure. Students gather with the families and honor their "first patients."