Loyola University Medical Center ranked among the top hospitals in the world in a recent research competition for pathologists in training. Loyola was tied for the top nine programs in the number of scientific studies accepted in the Stowell-Orbison Awards competition sponsored by the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP). One hundred academic programs worldwide participated in the competition.

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Loyola Among World’s Top Centers In Pathology Competition

Drug competition in peril Baltimore Sun Jane Andrews is a medical student and public health student at the Johns Hopkins University and a member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. …

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Drug competition in peril – Baltimore Sun

- Frank W. Chen [forum discussion]

Health care education entails building the foundation of ushering in new generations of physicians and professionals to deliver quality care to patients on a global scale.  The very notion of training doctors has experienced tremendous upheaval in the history of America.  From the 1700s, medical education and licensure has undergone remarkable reform in the struggle to balance medicine as a business practice and a humanitarian pursuit.  In the early 20^th century, the Flexner report helped culminate a major upheaval to effect a radical change in perspective to bring about the professional ethic we see in the practice of medicine today.  However, one can argue that another round of reform is now in order to enable the standard of continuous quality improvement expected in a discipline grounded in utilizing best practices to help alleviate suffering and promote good health.  What type of initiative would best be put to use to fundamentally revolutionize the health care education system to empower the workforce to deliver coordinated and patient-centered medicine?  Implementing this reform must be rooted in measures that tackle performance-based goals on both an individual and system-wide level.  The most important change requires tackling this reform on both fronts simultaneously, recognizing that each goes hand in hand with the other.  Unifying these various efforts can be federally galvanized via a newly established National Health Education Reform Taskforce (NHERT), jointly governed under the Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine.

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- Mallika Mendu [forum discussion]

Health professional schools, and medical schools in particular, aim to select candidates who are intelligent, motivated and who embody the qualities of leadership and compassion.  Matriculating students begin their careers in medicine with a passionate desire to serve and have demonstrated an ability to work effectively with others, often in a leadership role.  Medical education should be designed to foster this enthusiasm and eagerness to provide care.  However, there is evidence that medical students become more cynical over the course of their medical school education.¹ In light of the current state of our healthcare system, with over 45 million uninsured, a significant percentage of patients with numerous barriers to care, and rising medical costs often attributable to avoidable medical errors due to a lack of interdisciplinary coordination, attitudes and values among health professionals in training are of utmost importance.  The question arises as to how to capture the original motivations of health professional students and ensure that those motivations are not lost as they embark on a career in medicine.  Health professional or medical student-run clinics have been developed by students in a number of medical institutions across the country.  These clinics are often founded by a core group of motivated students interested in serving the unmet healthcare needs of an underserved population in their community.² Though the main mission of these clinics is to alleviate barriers to care for disadvantaged patients, another important goal is to offer a unique educational experience to student volunteers.  Student-run clinics offer students, at all levels of training, the opportunity to understand the challenges of managing healthcare for underserved patients with limited resources and to work closely in teams, often with health professional students in varied disciplines.  Medical schools that have implemented student-run clinic programs have observed the value of this unique educational opportunity: students are engaged in clinical care early in their medical education; they are involved in all aspects of healthcare from social services and education to primary care and specialty referrals; they are responsible for coordinating care for their patients by working in teams. As a result, students are better able to relate to their patients, often the most disadvantaged of patient populations.³ In order to create a healthcare workforce equipped to provide a high-value team approach to coordinated, patient-centered healthcare, a fundamental change required of the healthcare education system is to support and help fund health professional student-run clinic programs in all medical institutions across the country.

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- Morgan Medlock [forum discussion]

Introduction

For decades, lawmakers have pondered the prospect of sweeping health care reform in America, and the current economic crisis has intensified its importance. We can no longer endure the rising costs, declining value, and lack of coverage plaguing our health care system. At 16% of gross domestic product, U.S. health spending is double the median of other industrialized nations, yet America ranks 15th to 40th on several key health measures, ranging from life expectancy to years of life lost due to preventable causes.^1,2 The U.S. health system is not the best in quality of care, nor is it a leader in health information technology.³ Our challenges are complex, and the burden of harm is staggering.

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- Wael Salem [forum discussion]

The renaissance era of medicine is in full force and the body of knowledge is growing exponentially.  As the knowledge base balloons, the onus is on health care professionals to amass this knowledge, stay current, push forward with research and then educate the next generation.  Meanwhile the health care system in which these physicians, nurses and allied health professionals must work is evolving at an equally dizzying pace.  The medical education model at most institutions, however, has changed little to accommodate the recent changes in the biomedical sciences and even less in its attempt to make sense of the health care delivery system [1, 2].

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- Duc M. Chung [forum disccusion]

Introduction

Global-minded and culturally-sensitive communication skills are pertinent yet often overlooked components of our health care education system. Emphasis in health professional schools has been on mastery of scientific concepts via problem and system based learning, following didactical algorithms to make diagnoses. While these do provide necessary clinical skills to treat patients, of equal importance is that health care providers are aware of national health care issues and attain effective communication skills to promote healthcare prevention and continuity of care for all patients. Research from the World Health Organization indicates that although the US has the most costly healthcare system, it is the only developed nation aside from South Africa that do not provide healthcare to all of its citizens.ⁱ In fact, an estimated 42.6 million people are uninsured.ⁱⁱ These astounding statistics account for the US’s low ranks in health and well-being (it ranks 26th amongst industrialized nations in infant mortality rate) and healthcare satisfaction (only 40% of US citizens are satisfied with their healthcare system).ⁱⁱⁱ

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- Donna Kaminski [forum discussion]

According to several polls, between 60 to 82% of the United States public believes that our health system needs fundamental change. ^(1,2) When we take a closer look at our current system, it would seem that the public would have a basis for this assertion. Our system of care is by far the most costly in the industrialized world, absorbing 15% of our gross domestic product (GDP), a figure that continues to rise. It is expected to reach 19.2 % by the year 2017. ^(3,4) Despite the large amount of funds we invest in our care, the United States ranked 37^th in overall performance and 72^nd in overall level of health, when evaluated among 191 countries by the World Health Organization (WHO).^(6,7). Part of this discrepancy between cost and care may be explained by inefficiency. According to the National Academy of Engineering, between 30 and 40% of U.S. health care spending is associated with failures, such as poor communication or duplication. ⁽⁸⁾ However, beyond failures, our health care system suffers from an approach that is less focused on overall patient health, and at times overuses technology. For example, while in the U.S. the MRI-to-person ratio is ten times that of Canada’s, each year, many children will go unvaccinated. In addition, despite spending as much as we do on health care, 16 out of every 100 Americans continue to go uninsured, and another 10 are underinsured. ^(1). These statistics suggest what the American public has been sharing from their dining room tables to the many polls that have been taken, we as a country are in dire need of health care reform.

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- Salim Abboud [forum discussion]

Health care needs in the United States have evolved over the years due to several factors, including an aging U.S. populace that has ever increasing demands in managing chronic illnesses. The U.S. health care system, meanwhile, has in many ways failed to adapt to these changing needs and the result has been increasing health care costs and unsatisfactory or largely unavailable medical care to those in need. A shortage and underutilization of primary care physicians, a group that has an important role in preventative care and the coordination of care for chronic illnesses, is key to both understanding and resolving this failure of the health care system.¹² Like so many problems in U.S. health care, this problem of too few primary care physicians is one of finances. A career as a primary care physician is by default less attractive to many students considering medicine as a profession simply because it is typically far less lucrative than most medical subspecialties. Even for students who would prefer a career in primary care medicine, the prospect of paying student loans may steer them towards a higher paying subspecialty or prevent them from pursuing a medical education at all.¹² Reducing the time and cost of an M.D. degree may therefore have an important role in relieving the over-burdened health care system by removing barriers to practicing primary care and increasing the amount of primary care physicians, thereby enabling the current health care system to better satisfy the country’s need for better coordinated, patient-centered care of chronic disease.

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