General Internal Medicine - News and Announcements

 

Upcoming Conferences

General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics Research Conference
Fridays 9am-10am, Rubloff 10th Floor Lake Shore Conference Room
All faculty and staff are welcome to present and attend!

05/10:Dr. Stephen D. Persell, MD, MPH Associate Professor in Medicine-General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics will present  "Improving the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease using population health and point of care testing approaches."
05/17: Joyce W. Tang, MD, Assistant Professor in Medicine-General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics will present "Peer coaching to reduce risk factors for type 2 diabetes among women with gestational diabetes."
05/24: Cancelled
05/31: Open
06/07: Open
06/14: William Karl Thompson, PhD, Research Assistant Professor in Medicine-General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics and Preventive Medicine will present “Anatomic Adenoma Detection Rates Determined via Natural Language Processing: A Refined Quality Metric for Colonoscopy?”

If you are interested in presenting the GIM-Geriatrics Research Conference, please contact Michael Wolf, PhD, MPH.
Topics/Presenter information is distributed via an email listserv. Please contact Alex Cohn to be added to the listserv.
 

Dr. Mary McDermott Honored by Society of Vascular Medicine
Mary McDermott, MD has been selected to receive the designation “Master of the Society of Vascular Medicine.” This is the highest award bestowed by the Society of Vascular Medicine and is conferred upon individuals who have provided extraordinary service to the Society for Vascular Medicine. The award will be presented by the SVM President at the Annual Meeting in June of this year.

Joseph Feinglass Honored by Program in Public Health
Congratulations to Joe Feinglass, PhD who was awarded the Program in Public Health Teaching Excellence Award for his course on Health Services Research Design.  The Northwestern University Master of Public Health Degree Program provides an educational environment for health professionals that fosters acquisition of knowledge about the factors that contribute to the health and diseases of populations and to educate these individuals to be boundary spanners between professions engaged in clinical care and public health. Dr. Feinglass is a Research Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and the Division of Preventive Medicine.

Marianne Green Appointed as Chair to ABIM Committee
Marianne Green, MD, Associate Dean for Medical Education & Competency Achievement and Associate Professor in General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics and Medical Education, was recently appointed as Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Internal Medicine Test Writing Committee.

Dr. Baker Honored for Contributions to Clinical Epidemiology
David Baker, MD, MPH, chief of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics and deputy director of the Institute for Public Health and Medicine, is being honored with one of the American College of Physicians’ most prestigious honors, the Alvan R. Feinstein Award. Presented biannually to an American physician who has made a major contribution to the science of clinical epidemiology, Baker will receive the award at a convocation ceremony on April 11 in San Francisco.  Read more here. 

 

Dr. Will Thompson received a distinguished paper award at the 2012 Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) in Chicago for his paper, "An Evaluation of the NQF Quality Data Model for Representing Electronic Health Record Driven Phenotyping Algorithms.” Only five such awards are granted. Dr. Thompson collaborated with researchers at Northwestern, Mayo Clinic, Vanderbilt University, and Marshfield Clinic to examine ways that data from electronic health records could be used to identify patients with specific clinical conditions so that they can identify possible genetic causes. This work stems from the electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) network.

 

Marla Clayman, PhD, MPH has been chosen as Chair-Elect for the Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section of the American Public Health Association. PHEHP is the largest section of APHA with about 3,000 members. Marla’s term as Chair will begin at the 2013 Annual Meeting in Boston.

 

Clinical Community Service Award
Dr. June M. McKoy is the 2012 co-recipient of the Clinical Community Service Award from Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation. The Award is given to a physician who has performed notable clinical activities outside of his/her routine responsibilities at Northwestern, caring for under-served populations either in the local community or on a national or international basis. Dr McKoy was cited for multiple activities, including her volunteer work with underserved seniors in Chicago and with the American Cancer Society.

 

Dr. Michael Wolf and HeLP Team Up with United Healthcare and AARP
Northwestern's Health Literacy and Learning Program (HeLP) has teamed up with United Healthcare and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) Services, Inc., on a new program to help older Americans take their medications as prescribed. HeLP’s new program will include development of Web-based and mobile applications that will enable patients to manage their day-to-day, complex medication regimens safely and effectively. Dr. Michael Wolf, Associate Professor of Medicine and Learning Sciences, and Associate Division Chief for General Internal Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, says, "This project will give us a chance to learn more about the problem and apply evidence-based strategies to help a large number of health care consumers tackle this very common behavior." The full article in the Wall Street Journal is available at http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20120330-907180.html.
 

Dr. Andrew Thurston, fellow in Geriatrics, was selected to attend the Donald W. Reynolds Mini-Fellowship in Palliative Care at Duke University from June 11 - 15, 2012.

 

Vinky Chadha, MD, is the 2012 recipient of best clinical teacher Joost Award.  This is a medical school award given by the graduating class to the best clinical teacher. It encompasses all specialties in the medical school.  Dr. Chadha is a graduate of Northwestern University's Honors Program in Medical Education and Northwestern's internal medicine residency program. He is an NMH site director for the junior medicine clerkship. Dr. Chadha also spends approximately twenty weeks per year on the inpatient teaching service.

 

Michael Wolf, PhD, MPH, associate division chief, is quoted in multiple media outlets including Yahoo! Finance regarding the Feinberg School’s partnership with UnitedHealthcare and AARP to develop a new program to help older Americans take their medications as prescribed. Wolf comments that people, especially older Americans, are increasingly faced with complex medication regimens that can be very challenging to follow properly and to sustain over time. He adds that this project will give us a chance to learn more about the problem and apply evidence-based strategies to help a large number of health care consumers tackle this very common behavior.  Find the article here.

 

Dr. Noel DeBacker has been selected as the 2012 Medical Director of the Year by the the American Medical Directors Association. The Medical Director of the Year Award recognizes those individuals whose vision, passion, leadership, knowledge, and commitment succeed in taking patient care in the facilities they serve as medical director to exceptional levels of quality, excellence, and innovation.

 

Mary McDermott, MD was recently elected to chair the the Peripheral Vascular Disease Interdisciplinary Council of the American Heart Association as of July 2st, 2011.  The American Heart Association publishes medical scientific statements on various cardiovascular disease and stroke topics that are supported by scientific studies published in recognized journals and have a rigorous review and approval process.

 

Mary McDermott, MD was recently invited to be a lead author on the The Inter-Society Consensus, or TASC III guidelines for peripheral arterial disease.  These guidelines were developed to provide an international consensus on the diagnosis and treatment of PAD.   Dr. McDermott will be leading the chapter on intermittent claudication.

 

Kenzie Cameron, PhD, MPH was recently made a Member of the Feinberg Academy of Medical Educators (FAME).  The Feinberg Academy of Medical Educators has a critical role to play in supporting initiatives in faculty development, educational innovation, and the recognition of outstanding teaching. These initiatives will help to identify, recruit, train and inspire leaders in medical education.

 

Dr. David Baker, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine, had been appointed to the Coordinating Committee for the Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  He will represent the American College of Physicians.  The MAP Coordinating Committee will provide input to HHS on the selection of the performance measures for use in public reporting and performance-based payment programs.  The work of the Coordinating Committee will be desgned to support HHS National Quality Strategy, the National Prevention and Health Promotion Strategy, and the National Patient Safety Initiative.

 

The Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation's Division of General Internal Medicine was selected as the winner of this year's Society of General Internal Medicine Clinical Practice Innovation Award.

 

Feinberg School of Medicine faculty member Diane B. Wayne, MD has been invited to speak at the National Institutes of health as part of the Clinical Grand Rounds Series on Great Teachers on February 9, 2011.  We are very pleased to see Diane's work at Northwestern featured in this prestigious forum.  The FSM Center for Education in Medicine will be simulcasting Dr. Wayne's talk on February 9th at 11am in the Baldwin Auditorium of the Lurie Building.  For more information, please visit the NIH website at:  http://calendar.nih.gov/app/MCalInfoView.aspx?evtID=22749

 

On January 25th, the Department of Medicine Residency Research Group garnered attention at the international meeting of the Society of Simulation in Healthcare in New Orleans.  Impressively, out of four categories, the research group won two awards:  best research paper in the category of patient safety (Barsuk et al, Archives Internal Medicine 2009) and best research paper in the category of Cost-Effectiveness (Cohen et al, Simulation in Healthcare 2010).  This research group's efforts, in partnership with NMH, has shown great benefit to critically ill patients by reducing catheter-related bloodstream infections, and showing that patient care during cardiac arrest events and CVC insertion skills have improved.  Team members of this research group include:  Jeff Barsuk, William McGaghie, Lainie Cohen, Cindy Barnard, Joe Feinglass, and Diane Wayne. 

 

 

To help prevent busy doctors from missing important details about a patient's care during an office examination, Northwestern Medicine Researchers have created a whip-smart assistant for physicians - a new system using electronic health records that alerts dcotors during an exam when a patient's care is amiss.  "The pieces of this system aren't new, but putting them together in a compreheansive way is new, said lead author Stephen Persell, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.  "If you put these things together in a smart way, then electronic health records are powerful tools for quality of care.  ...We used reminders that were not intrusive, but were still effective because doctors had faiththat the data was accurate and they could enter data to make it more accurate."  David Baker, M.D., senior author and Chief of Northwestern Medicine's general internal medicine division, added, "We wanted physicians to feel ownership of this.  For this to work well, they have to view the alerts and reporting system as their personal quality improvement tools."  Read the full story here.

 

 

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has announced the creation of the Community Health Applied Research Network (CHARN) to demonstrate that safety net providers and academic institutions can partner together to create an effective infrastructure that supports patient-centered outcomes research and comparative effectiveness research. The Alliance of Chicago Community Health Centers has been selected to be one of only four research center nodes nationally, and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine will serve as the Alliance’s academic partner.  Dr. David Baker, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine, will lead Northwestern’s team in this partnership. Dr. Abel Kho (Division of General Internal Medicine), Dr. Helen Binns (Children’s Memorial Hospital, Department of Pediatrics), and Dr. Richard Gershon (Department of Medical Social Sciences) will also provide expertise in informatics, practice-based research, and health outcomes measurement. This partnership builds on an existing relationship through the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Science Institute (NUCATS).  Dr. Baker and Dr. Binns lead NUCATS’ two practice- based research networks. This CHARN network will provide an opportunity to conduct patient-centered outcomes research among diverse populations and patient subgroups that are usually not represented in similar studies and help to reduce disparities and improve health outcomes for all patients.  Further, this funding is the first of its kind that helps position communities to play a leading role in setting and carrying out a research agenda for the direct benefit of the populations served.

B Ruo, SW Choi, DW Baker, KL Grady, DC Cella. “Development and validation of a computer adaptive test for measuring dyspnea in heart failure.” Journal of Cardiac Failure 2010; 16 (8): 659-668. 

Clayman M.L, Pandit A.U., Bergeron A.R., Cameron K.A., Ross E., Wolf, M.S. (2010). Ask, understand, remember: A brief measure of patient communication self-efficacy within clinical encounters.  Journal of Health Communication, 15:72-29.

 

Cameron, K.A., Ross, E., Clayman, M.L., Bergeron, A.R., Federman, A.D., Cooper Bailey, S., Davis, T.C., Wolf, M.S.  (2010). Measuring patients’ self-efficacy in understanding and using prescription medication. Patient Education and Counseling, 80, 372-376(invited submission for Special Issue of International Conference on Communication in Healthcare 2009).

 

Wilson, E.A.H., Wolf, M.S., Curtis, L.M.,Clayman, M.L., Cameron, K.A., Vom Eigen, K., Makoul, G. (2010). Literacy, cognitive ability, and the retention of health-related information about colorectal cancer screening. Journal of Health Communication, 15:116-125.

 

Wilson, E.A.H., Park, D.C., Curtis, L., Cameron, K.A., Clayman, M., Makoul, G., vom Eigen, K., Wolf, M.S. (2010). Media and memory: The efficacy of video and print materials for promoting patient education about asthma. Patient Education and Counseling, 80, 393-398. (invited submission for Special Issue of International Conference on Communication in Healthcare 2009).

 

Cameron, K.A., Persell, S.D., Brown, T., Thompson, J.A., Baker, D.W. (In Press) A Randomized Controlled Trial of Patient Outreach to Promote Colorectal Cancer Screening among Patients with an Expired Order for Colonoscopy. Archives of Internal Medicine.