P&S Annual Report
Educational Initiatives

Students Today...Doctors Tomorrow

Ever since Columbia's medical school awarded the first medical degree in the country--in 1770--P&S has maintained high educational standards. P&S continually ranks among the top choices of medical schools. In 1995-96, 4,266 men and women applied for the 150 openings in the first-year class at P&S. The quality of the applicants, as well as the quantity, attests to the regard potential students have for a P&S education. These pages outline a few of the reasons a P&S education is so highly coveted.

Our medical informatics program, for instance, is a model for other medical schools. An electronic curriculum, a new family medicine residency program, new nutrition courses, and expanding courses in alternative medicine help P&S keep up with changing needs of medical students. 
 
To build a legacy for teaching, P&S has set a goal to increase its endowment to $1 billion and the number of fully endowed chairs to 100 by the year 2003. 

Match Day 1996 was termed one of the best in P&S history. About 40 percent of the 137 class members who began residencies chose primary care fields. After medicine, the most popular residency choices were surgery, family practice, and pediatrics. 

Among innovative educational programs: 
 --a course, "Internet for Physicians," for CME credit 
 --broadcast of microbiology's immunology course to the downtown campus of Columbia (in collaboration with faculty in Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science) 
 --a curriculum in health-related quality-of-life research, examining quality of life as an outcome in clinical research, clinical trials, and health policy. The course, offered through the School of Public Health, was developed by faculty in the Sergievsky Center and the Morris W. Stroud III Center for Study of Quality of Life. 
 --new affiliation agreements with New Milford Hospital in New Milford, Conn., and Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J., bringing to eight the number of hospitals linked to CPMC. Each affiliation expands opportunities for physician training and continuing education. 
 --programs to recruit minorities to health professions 

Medical Curriculum for the Autodidact 

In 1989, P&S received the first of two grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for revising and updating the delivery of health sciences education. P&S became part of a national initiative, "Preparing Physicians for the Future: A Program in Medical Education," to address changes in scientific and clinical training in the nation's medical education system. The initiative has resulted in a revised curriculum that keeps abreast of changes in health care delivery, technology, and teaching methods, including accommodating the increasing role of computers in clinical education and practice. 

Technicians have connected the Health Sciences residence halls to the campus computer network, providing 24-hour access to online resources such as CPMCnet--the gateway to local and global resources on the World Wide Web. (The Office of Scholarly Resources developed and maintains CPMCnet.) That development--as well as the increasing role of computer-augmented learning at P&S--is part of a massive plan to help faculty, staff, and students keep pace with the expanding information resources found online. One goal of the Columbia Health Information PerspectiveS project (CHIPS), for example, is to create an electronic curriculum that enables students to control how, when, where, and in what sequence they learn. Because computers play an increasing role in the diagnosis, treatment, and management of patients, the P&S computerization plan is also meant to provide a realistic tool graduates will use in their medical careers. 

Four years ago, Dr. Herbert Chase Jr. designed and implemented Science Basic to the Practice of Medicine. The course, required of first-year P&S students, is a 325-hour effort involving 75 faculty members who provide the basic medical science that serves as a foundation for understanding the systems and processes the human body uses to function normally. In 1994, Dr. Chase received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education to establish an electronic basic medical science core curriculum. Dr. Chase; Jeff Zucker, lead developer of CHIPS in the Office of Scholarly Resources; and others have crafted a system that will do much more than transfer printed course materials to the computer. In developing the online curriculum for the course Science Basic to the Practice of Medicine they envision a resource tool that integrates information from a variety of media in one place. Besides integrating text, slides, and graphs, the new online course--inaugurated in 1996 for the Class of 2000--offers glossaries, search capabilities, and discussion groups and will feature self-tests and instructive animations. 

Malcolm X Legacy 

Previous and current recipients of Malcolm X Scholarships celebrated the 10th anniversary of the award program established by P&S to help African-American students interested in medical and public health problems prevalent in minority communities. 

P&S worked with Dr. Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, to establish the commemorative scholarship awarded to third- and fourth-year P&S minority students who show academic merit and who demonstrate a commitment to providing medical assistance to their communities. 

Since its inception, the scholarship fund has grown to help four students each year, and 20 students have graduated from P&S with support from the scholarship. The scholars now practice in fields as diverse as anesthesiology and pediatrics and can be found in hospitals and clinics from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. 

Assassinated in 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom, across the street from the medical center, Malcolm X was, and remains, an ideological civil rights hero to many. Carol L. Brown'86, the first recipient of the Malcolm X scholarship, says the award was a great honor for her because she was inspired by Malcolm X. Dr. Brown currently serves the African-American community on the clinical advisory board of the Breast Examination Center of Harlem and is also helping the director of surgery at Harlem Hospital Center expand the center to include screening for cervical cancer, a gynecologic cancer common among African-American women. 

Other Malcolm X scholarship alumni share Dr. Brown's enthusiasm for community service. By volunteering as counselors, tutors, and mentors, they continue their commitment to the African-American community as a legacy to Malcolm X. 

Attracting Minorities to Health Professions

The State Pre-College Enrichment Program (S-PREP), offered through the P&S Office of Minority Affairs, is a rigorous academic program for minority students, grades 9 to 12, who are seriously interested in medicine or related health professions. S-PREP offers a schedule of basic and medical science courses structured to place emphasis on the teaching of laboratory skills. Career counseling and college admission workshops are held during the year. 

The Summer High School Minority Student/Teacher Initiative Program, offered through the Office of Minority Affairs, stimulates support and interest among minority high school students in biomedical research and the health professions as career choices. Ten students participate in the six-week summer program and conduct research under the mentorship of Columbia faculty. Career counseling, college admissions workshops, and scientific enrichment activities are included. 

The Bureau of Health Professions gave the Occupational Therapy Programs a three-year, $180,000 training grant to increase minority student recruitment and enrollment into health care fields. The grant links the OT program with Pace University and Harlem Hospital Center to increase educational success for minority students interested in health-related careers in general and occupational therapy in particular. 

New Educational Programs

A medical informatics degree program is the first graduate program of its kind in the state and joins about 20 schools nationwide in offering graduate degrees in this emerging field. 

A new family medicine residency program is committed to training physicians to treat families, particularly in urban communities. CPMC is the second academic medical center in the New York metropolitan area--after Montefiore--to offer a family practice residency. Director: Christopher Wang 

A new course offered by the Institute of Human Nutrition is "Molecular Nutrition," which presents the molecular principles underlying the regulation of gene expression in response to the nutritional status of an organism. 

The Health Sciences Library, the Center for Academic Information Technology, and Dr. Steven Hyler developed a course, "Internet for Physicians," for CME credit. The course was presented three times--twice for CPMC physicians and a third time, sponsored by the Office for Continuing Medical Education, for physicians from the tri-state area. 

The Institute of Human Nutrition initiated a new master of science degree program for practicing clinicians, reflecting the growing role of nutrition in therapeutic and preventive realms of health care. The M.S. for physicians program gives clinicians basic tools to provide patients and communities with nutrition approaches to promote health and prevent disease. The first year of the program has enrolled 10 clinicians with experience ranging from one year to 50 years of practice. The program is expected to grow. 

A newly formed doctoral subcommittee in neurobiology and behavior matriculated a first class of seven students. The intercampus program, with faculty from six basic sciences and two clinical departments plus biological science and psychology departments at the Morningside Heights campus, provides broad interdisciplinary training in the neural sciences. 

Education Across Disciplines

The Center for Biomedical Engineering was established by P&S and Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1995 to foster interdisciplinary bioengineering research and education. Dr. Van C. Mow, director of the P&S Orthopaedic Research Lab, directs the center. Located in the engineering school on Columbia's Morningside Heights campus, the center promotes synergistic interactions between the university's medical and engineering faculties. Approximately 100 undergraduates, 60 biomedical engineering graduate students, and 10 new tenure-track faculty members are expected by the year 2000. Students will take courses through both schools and pursue interdisciplinary research with biomedical researchers at P&S. 

Education Across National Borders

The Institute of Human Nutrition has new exchange programs with the Catholic University of Chile and the Abraham Center for International Health and Nutrition at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. The Catholic University program makes research sites in South America available for institute students. The program in Israel provides collaborative research in chronic diarrhea and malnutrition projects, joint faculty appointments and exchanges, jointly sponsored faculty conferences, and student training. One Columbia student, Sarah Kahn, completed her M.S./M.P.H. thesis research in nutrition by studying nutrition behavior in desert Bedouins in southern Israel. 

Students Get Wired

Four student residence buildings--Bard, Georgian, Tower 1, and 154 Haven--have been wired into the Health Sciences campus computer network, enabling students to connect a properly configured computer to the network and access networked resources at high network speeds. The remaining residences were expected to be wired by February 1997. 

Public-access computer clusters using Macintosh and Windows PCs have been and will continue to be available at several locations on the Health Sciences campus, but the wiring project will give students the convenience of using their own computers to access networked resources from their rooms. Networked resources include electronic mail, online library holdings, indexes and abstracts, student services (students will soon be registering for classes and ordering transcripts online), and, increasingly, course syllabi and lectures. 

Oversight of the wiring and network installation was provided by CPMC's Core Resources (Network Support) Group. Support for students connecting to the network from the Health Sciences residence buildings is provided by the Center for Academic Information Technology. 

Learning About Alternatives

The Rosenthal Center for Alternative/Complementary Medicine was established in 1993 with a five-year start-up grant from the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation. The goal of the center is to gather and evaluate scientific, empirical, and observational data on alternative medical practices and to be a physician and consumer information resource. The center is part of a trend among established U.S. biomedical settings, including the founding of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the NIH in 1992, to study alternative medical practices. 

Education--of medical students and medical practitioners--is also a goal. The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, on behalf of Angelica and Russell Berrie, gave the Rosenthal Center funds to develop a complementary and alternative medicine section of the P&S Clinical Practice Course. The director of the course will work with faculty advisers to develop a model educational program in alternative medicine. One major area of concentration will be mind/body medicine, an area in which considerable research material is available and faculty interest is high. 

For the public and the medical establishment, the Rosenthal Center offers courses such as the 1996 continuing medical education credit course, "Botanical Medicine In Modern Clinical Practice." Although the use of botanicals has become popular among Americans, little information is available to the general public or medical professionals. The course, led by Rosenthal Center Director Dr. Fredi Kronenberg, was designed for physicians, nurses, residents, and medical and nursing students to provide information that would enable clinicians to responsibly begin incorporating herbal medicines into their practices and to knowledgeably advise patients who use or seek herbal remedies. 

Goal: More Endowed Profs

After a positive accreditation review by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), ambitious goals were set for the next LCME review, in 2003. The school hopes to increase its endowment to $1 billion and the number of fully endowed chairs to 100. The endowment now stands at $550 million and the number of fully endowed chairs is 70. 

Neurosciences Review 

Neurological surgery, neurology, and pathology departments have planned the 19th annual Neuroscience Review Course, a popular interdisciplinary program for faculty, housestaff, and fellows from P&S and other institutions in the tri-state area. 

Access Worldwide

A Health Sciences Library home page on CPMCnet provides online access to information about library services and policies and serves as an easy-to-navigate framework for access to medical and other health-related resources on the World Wide Web. 

Pediatrics Education

Pediatrics uses an innovative approach to teaching clinical skills and attitudes to medical students. A structured clinical reasoning curriculum is based on feedback sessions. Students meet the ambitious primary objective of their pediatric experience and articulate a logical reasoning process to solve patient problems. Pediatric clinical clerkship coordinators from all affiliated programs meet regularly to discuss teaching and administrative issues for medical students, providing uniformity in the experiences of medical students. Steven Miller 

Trauma Education

The Trauma Training Center was established at CPMC's New York Orthopaedic Hospital in 1995 to provide new areas of excellence in graduate and postgraduate trauma education and trauma surgical training. The center also pursues basic and applied studies to develop new treatment modalities of musculoskeletal trauma. During its first year, the center awarded a trauma research fellowship to an incoming orthopedic resident and started several clinical trauma-related projects. David L. Andrews, Melvin P. Rosenwasser, Robert J. Pawluk 

Applying Education to Peer-Reviewed Publishing

The P&S Medical Review, a peer-reviewed journal founded and edited by P&S students with faculty guidance, has completed its third year of publication. One of only a handful of such publications in U.S. medical schools, the P&S Medical Review publishes student- and faculty-authored papers. A board of student editors conducts blind reviews of all submissions. After the student board selects research articles based on interest, originality, and overall quality, faculty members review the articles for accuracy and medical relevance. Each issue includes a historical article based on original research at Columbia, followed by a faculty commentary on the historical study. 

Improving High School Science Education

Each year, as many as 10 science teachers are selected competitively from among New York City secondary school teacher applicants to work in a P&S research laboratory under faculty supervision. The teachers work in the lab for at least eight weeks during each of two consecutive summers. In addition to planning, executing, and reporting on research experiments, the teachers participate in weekly seminars on a variety of topics and develop plans for incorporating new ideas and activities into their classrooms. 

Training for HIV, Mental Health: A Growing Need

The HIV Mental Health Training Project trains mental health care providers at hospitals, state-funded outpatient sites, community residences, forensic psychiatric centers, and other programs for HIV-infected substance abusers with mental illness. More than 5,600 mental health care providers were trained in the project's first three years, and more than 2,000 mental health care providers will be trained each year during the next phase to help meet an enormous demand for the training. Director: Francine Cournos