NAMED PROFESSORSHIPS
Patient-focused model for handoffs The new model for ambulatory resident clinic handoffs developed by Amber Pincavage, MD’07, and her team addresses:
Communication Outgoing residents prepare a written sign-out on patients and review the information face to face with new residents.
Scheduling High-risk patients receive a regular appointment schedule throughout their care with a resident and priority in scheduling when the new resident takes over. No-shows for the initial appointment are automatically rescheduled once.
Contact New residents call their high-risk patients and introduce themselves, ask about problems, follow up on pending tests and ensure medications are refilled. All new patients receive letters from both residents informing them of the change. The letters include some professional and personal background on the new physician, including a photo and even a phonetic pronunciation of the resident’s name.
Appreciation Each time they have to change doctors, patients receive a certificate recognizing the important role they play in resident education.
Pincavage focused on highrisk patients most likely to get lost during the handoff process. Her co-authors are Megan Prochaska, MD’11, now an internal medicine resident at the University of Chicago Medicine; Marcus Dahlstrom, MD’12, internal medicine resident at the University of California, San Francisco; Wei Wei Lee, MD, MPH, assistant professor of uchospitals.edu/midway
medicine; Lisa Vinci, MD, MS, associate professor of medicine and medical director of the Primary Care Group; and Julie Oyler, MD’01, assistant professor of medicine and associate program director of the internal medicine residency. Pincavage’s mentor in the field of handoff research is Vineet Arora, MD, MA’03, associate professor of medicine, assistant dean for scholarship and discovery and associate program director of the internal medicine residency. Their work was funded by the Picker Institute-Gold Foundation Challenge Grant, and the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence and Graduate Medical Education Committee at the University of Chicago.
Deans Humphrey, Gilliam honored
H
olly J. Humphrey, MD’83, dean for medical education at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and a nationally recognized leader in medical education scholarship, has been named the Ralph W. Gerard Professor in Medicine. Humphrey served as director of the internal medicine residency program for 14 years before moving to her current position in 2003. She has launched numerous initiatives at Pritzker, including a sweeping curriculum reform effort, advising and mentoring programs, and the Bowman Society, which explores issues of health care disparities and provides mentoring for minority students, residents and faculty. Humphrey also was instrumental in the development of new pipeline programs to Holly J. Humphrey, MD’83 prepare underrepresented minority students for careers in medicine. She is the editor of “Mentoring in Academic Medicine” (2010), a member of the board of trustees of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, former president of the Association of Program Directors of Internal Medicine (APDIM) and a Master of the American College of Physicians.
Conrad Gilliam, PhD, professor in human genetics and dean for research and graduate education in the Biological Sciences Division, has been named the Marjorie I. and Bernard A. Mitchell Distinguished Service Professor. Gilliam is an authority on the identification and characterization of heritable mutations that affect the nervous system. As dean, he is responsible for the strategic planning and quality control of research and graduate education throughout the BSD. He also is a senior fellow at the Computation Institute and the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology and a Pritzker Fellow. T. Conrad Gilliam, PhD Gilliam came to the University in 2004 from Columbia University, where he was a professor in the departments of genetics and development, and psychiatry, and director of the Columbia Genome Center since 2000. MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY
SPRING 2013
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