Your Medicine Online Reports on this year’s Physician-in-Chief Pro Tempore, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Where have the topics of aging, health inequalities, philanthropy, the magnetic pull of the earth, and a patient-centered revolution come together at Brigham and Women's Hospital in the past few weeks? Perhaps nowhere in a manner more visionary than the Grand Rounds lecture on March 18 by Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the 2005 Physician-in-Chief Pro Tempore and the inaugural Victor J. Dzau Lecture.

The Pro Tempore program, initiated in 1913 by Dr. Henry Christian, invites a world leader in medicine to serve as the Physician-in-Chief, teaching and inspiring vision during their stay, originally a full week spent (living, working and sleeping) in-house. Though the Pro Tem is now housed more comfortably and spared the on-call experience, Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey’s visit allowed the Department of Medicine faculty to consult with her in the context of small group meetings and patient rounds, culminating in her Medical Grand Rounds lecture, Holding the Needle on True North: Discovering the Path to Quality Care”

Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey is no stranger to long nights at the Brigham. She completed her residency at the old Peter Bent Brigham Hospital before moving on to serve as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialized in geriatric medicine. She then completed an MBA at Wharton School of Business and was appointed Sylvan Eisman Professor of Medicine and Health Care Systems at Penn, where she founded the Institute on Aging, a “center without walls,” that networked across disciplines to assure optimal geriatric medical care. Read More

In January we reported on a few of the innovative medical education-based projects that are underway thanks to the Department of Medicine Education Council’s Support for Excellence in Educational Development (SEED) Grants, one-year grants to support prjects on innovation in medical education and prepare grantees to compete for larger grant funding. This month we take a look at two more SEED-funded projects, one on medical law and the other on community-based care.

Where can housestaff learn the latest in medical law and policy issues that affect their patients and be sensitive to the needs of the local community? Especially when physicians spend so much time within Brigham walls? Aaron Kesselheim, MD, Mark Friedberg, MD and Alexandra Molnar, MD, have spent the past year working to solve this dilemma by embedding these issues into the residency training program.

Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, who came to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital with a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, is a Clinical Fellow in Medicine and a senior resident. He has been involved with SEED-sponsored curricular innovation since his junior year, when he established a series of small and large group lectures to introduce basic principles of health law to medical housestaff. The response was so positive that Dr. Kesselheim teamed up with Mark Friedberg, MD to apply for a second year of funding, in a joint project to help provide housestaff with a better understanding of the various political, regulatory and legal issues affecting medicine today. Read More