Allan Guiney’14
“The way we do things at Bassett does make studying for shelf exams more difficult,” says Mr. Alberts. “Our classmates in Washington Heights are immersed in ob-gyn for six weeks, for example, and then they take the ob-gyn exam. They have nothing else to think about for those six weeks. We take the shelf exam every 6-8 weeks like they do, but we’re not immersed in that single subject.” For the first few months, Mr. Alberts was nervous about that. “With just those brief immersion periods at the beginning, was I learning everything I needed to know from medicine, from surgery, and so on?” he says. “But as the year has gone on, I’ve realized that we can’t just drop those skills once we’ve finished a rotation. We have to incorporate the complete picture of the health needs of our patients.” And he notes that his group’s shelf exam scores have followed an upward trajectory, just like those of his classmates in Washington Heights. “We learn to juggle multiple tasks – working with physicians in clinic and the hospital, doing research, working on performance improvement projects, following patients in our panels, and studying for shelf exams,” says Mr. Gomez. “Thinking about everything at once keeps us on our toes.” The Columbia-Bassett program seems to be particularly appealing to students with a bit more life experience under their belts than the traditional medical student. The majority of each year’s class did not go directly from college to medical school. In addition to Mr. Gomez’s engineering experience and Mr. Feinberg’s pro golfing, Katie Williams’16 spent time volunteering at a free public clinic in Chile, and Maeve O’Neill’16 18 ColumbiaMedicine Fall 2012
worked at the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute and traveled to El Salvador to help at a childhood malnutrition program. “I actually think that the class below us, the class of 2015, is on average older than we are,” says Mr. Guiney, who spent two years doing genetics research before entering medical school.
The SLIM curriculum Another unique aspect of the Columbia-Bassett program is its SLIM (Systems, Leadership, Integration, and Management) curriculum. Taught in collaboration with Columbia’s business and public health schools, SLIM comprises about 5 percent of the Bassett students’ total time and is designed to prepare students to understand the U.S. health care system, the ways in which care is delivered, strategies for quality improvement, and the overarching issues of cost and payment. They participate in Bassett Functional Teams, learning how the health system balances priorities and addressing non-clinical challenges ranging from encouraging better hand hygiene to integrating a new information system. They attend “SLIM Lunches” with stakeholders ranging from local business owners who struggle to provide health insurance for their employees, to a person with a high-risk cancer history who had to give up health insurance to pay for his children’s college, to politicians, lobbyists, and insurers. And for most Columbia-Bassett students, the scholarly project required before completing the Columbia M.D. degree will likely involve some element of the SLIM curriculum.