Click here to download the announcement for the Grants for Excellence in Medical Education program.

Winning grants are listed in alphabetical order by principal investigator.

Innovative Use of the Electronic Medical Record: Teaching Medical Students Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)

Andreas Cohrseen, M.D., Assistant Professor of Family & Social Medicine, AECOM/Beth Israel Medical Center

Utilizing electronic formats, Dr. Cohrssen proposes to assess the impact of CAM integration into medical education.  Students rotating through Beth Israel for their Family Medicine Clerkship will be exposed to CAM tools and guidelines programmed into the electronic medical record (EMR), as well as CAM informational websites linked to trainee computers.  This project will document the utility of the EMR and internet-based clinical resources for a component of medical education that has been challenging to integrate.

Tropical Medicine Curriculum Development Project

Christina M. Coyle, M.D., Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine, AECOM/Jacobi Medical Center

Overall goals for this project are to increase awareness in the AECOM community of diseases that affect immigrant populations and to integrate a focus on global health into the Parasitology course.  Specifically, Dr. Coyle plans to create a web-based mini-course for students planning to travel to international sites; to integrate case material from the Tropical Medicine Clinic at Jacobi into the small group teaching sessions in the Parasitology course, and to develop a “Global Health” lecture series.

Anatomy Reports on the Internet (ARI): From Reports to Resource

Sherry Downie, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Anatomy & Structural Biology, AECOM

This project is built upon the success of the ARI, a website designed to catalog text and images related to pathologies, evidence of surgeries, prostheses, or variations from normal anatomy discovered by first-year students during the course of dissection.  This proposal aims to enhance the accessibility of the ARI website, raise student awareness of the biomedical and clinical literature, and develop the website as a resource for students, faculty and clinicians in the AECOM community.

Use of Standardized Patients to Gain Additional Skills in Oral Communication During the Pre-clinical Years

Eric H. Green, M.D., M.Sc., Assistant Professor of Medicine, AECOM/Montefiore Medical Center

This project seeks to improve the confidence and enhance the skills of second-year medical students in the ICM-Clinical Examination course in making oral case presentations to precepting physicians in their clinical years.  Standardized patients will be used to portray patients with a single medical problem, allowing faculty to assess each student's competency; a second and more complicated standardized patient interview later in the year will further test the students' skills.  Students will receive immediate feedback and will view a videotape of the interview with their ICM preceptors.

Improving Faculty Lecturing Skills in the Obstetrics & Gynecology Clerkship

Nadine T. Katz, M.D., Associate Professor of Clinical Obstetrics & Gynecology and Women's Health, AECOM

This project seeks to improve the quality of the OB/GYN Clerkship lecture series by facilitating the development of a department-specific lecture evaluation tool to be administered by trained observers as well as students.  The investigators will compare the use of this tool alone with the use of the tool plus direct feedback, and with use of the tool, videotaping, and direct feedback.  Based on the success of this new tool the investigators will make a recommendation about whether it could be adapted for use in pre-clerkship courses or other clerkship lecture series.

Enhancing Biopsychosocial Learning in the Psychiatry Clerkship

Ali Khadivi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, and Jeffrey Levine, M.D., Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, AECOM/Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center

This project aims to improve the capacity of medical students to integrated medical and behavioral health – including social and cultural perspectives – in caring for patients both during and after their psychiatry clerkship experience.  Students will spend one afternoon per week performing physical examinations on adult psychiatric inpatients, and will be assigned at least one case with major medical and psychiatric co-morbidity.  For the latter, each student will receive individual supervision and will research, discuss, and present the relevant literature and social and cultural contributions to the medical and psychiatric problems.

Cardiac Auscultatory Training during the Third Year of Medical School

Robert Ostfeld, M.D., M.S., Assistant Professor of Medicine, AECOM/Montefiore Medical Center

This project aims to improve the cardiac physical examination skills of third-year students on internal medicine rotations.  After exposing groups of students to recorded heart sounds and testing them on their ability to identify these sounds (baseline), the investigator will arrange for students to examine patients in whom examples of these heart sounds are present.  Subsequently, students will be tested on their ability to identify these sounds.  A second testing session will be scheduled two weeks later to test recall.

Teaching Evidence-Based Medicine in the Third-Year Clerkship: Phrasing the Question and Finding the Answer

James Stulman, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine, AECOM/Montefiore

This project aims to improve the cardiac physical examination skills of third-year students on internal medicine rotations.  After exposing groups of students to recorded heart sounds and testing them on their ability to identify these sounds (baseline), the investigator will arrange for students to examine patients in whom examples of these heart sounds are present.  Subsequently, students will be tested on their ability to identify these sounds.  A second testing session will be scheduled two weeks later to test recall.