Quarterly News -- Winter
Mark Cullen, MD reports to you the quarterly news for Winter
Mark Cullen, MD
We start the new calendar year at a remarkable time—for our nation and its health care system, for our medical center as it strives to stay ahead of the curve, and for DGMD. I can’t forecast the outcome of the still murky big picture—though I remain cautiously optimistic—but on the home front I can state with some confidence that things are on the uptick.
On the clinical side the promise brought by Dr. Baldeep Singh’s arrival as SMG Director in the summer has begun to bear evident fruit. Morale and productivity at SMG are both up, and the plan for the merger of our primary care programs when IMC moves to Blake-Wilbur next in July is beginning to take substantive form. Not only will we have IM resident-panel and faculty panel patients working side-by-side, but the “new” SMG will also house a series of “primary care specialty” clinics availing the mornings when we have no resident continuity clinics. Included will be such things travel medicine, medical obesity management, geriatrics, occupational medicine, and likely women’s clinic, adult allergy and muskulo-skeletal clinics as well. And going back to the illustrious day when Dr. Hal Sox ran the Division, we are planning a weekly or biweekly clinical conference at Blake Wilbur where the whole faculty can discuss our most challenging cases and clinical conundrums. Starting in January, faculty at SMG and IMC, with the input of the IM residency program, will be meeting together to be begin the heavy lifting; it’s not too early to share your thoughts and ideas about any of the plans.
Needles to say the emergence of a new and expanded primary care center will also have enormous consequences—for the better we expect—for our teaching programs, not only for block residents but hopefully the medical students as well; maybe someday even GMD fellows! Not only will the roles of the trainees be much more clearly and appropriately defined under the new setup, but the new clinic offering should offer an unprecedented opportunity to train in outpatient areas that have been far less accessible up until now.
Perhaps the biggest changes are occurring on the academic side. Our monthly conferences—see the schedule on the home page—have gotten off to a wonderful start, highlighting research activities of several of us; we are looking for more speakers for late spring and summer already! Also, as you will shortly see on our newsy homepage, Yasmin Khan, a young public health specialist, has joined the Division to serve as liaison to any of our faculty eager to embark on a new research project. Working with Lauren Maggio our dedicated librarian, Yasmin should be able to walk you through the early phases of an idea, referring to Drs. Paik and Desai at our rapidly developing Quantitative Sciences Unit out at 1070 Arastradero or other senior statistical consultants on campus when projects reach a more mature stage. Feel free to emailYasmin can be reached at ykhan@stanford.edu or by stopping by at the Division offices on the third floor of MSOB. And finally, several searches are underway which should add enormous research strength to our Division, including most imminently the announcement of a leader for the long-awaited Center for Quality and Effective Care, allowing us to turn many of the incipient efforts in QI into broad-based scientific projects within the year. Before you know it we’ll have our entire faculty doing research!