It’s been said that even though February is the shortest month of the year, sometimes it can seem like the longest. Someone else once said, "Why does February feel like one big Tuesday?"
February can be a tough month for all of us. We know that spring is just around the corner. For our fourth-year medical students and some in the graduate programs that means graduation from UNMC. It’s hard to wait for that time to get here.
In the College of Medicine, February means that Match Day – when our fourth-year medical students learn where they will be doing their residency training – is looming with the match ranking lists due for both students and residency training programs this month.
This year’s Match Day will no doubt be extra special, as it will take place on March 17. I am betting there will be a fair amount of "green" in the room that day since this is, of course, St. Patrick’s Day. We look forward to celebrating another successful match with the students, which you will be able to follow, as the Match Day ceremony streams online.
Speaking of residency training, we recently announced that Dr. Chandra Are has been named designated institutional official (DIO) for the College of Medicine and associate dean for graduate medical education.
Many College of Medicine employees may not be aware of the DIO position, which is a very important post. The DIO oversees all of UNMC’s 56 residency and fellowship programs, which include more than 500 trainees, and he/she also is the individual who interacts with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).
For 37 of the past 40 years, the DIO position was held by Dr. Robert Wigton, one of our legendary faculty members, and for the past three years by Dr. Mike Wadman, who stepped down from that role to take over as chair of the UNMC Department of Emergency Medicine. Thanks to Mike for doing double duty since October until we completed a very competitive search process for his successor.
Dr. Are is an excellent fit for the DIO position, and I am confident he will do a stellar job of filling the big shoes of his predecessors. Prior to taking on the DIO role, he served as both the vice chair of education in the UNMC Department of Surgery and the program director of the general surgery residency program.
Dr. Are is dedicated to making graduate medical education better. He comes into the DIO position with some exciting ideas that could further enhance UNMC’s reputation as a national leader in graduate medical education. He believes strongly in the importance of research in resident and fellow education and hopes to implement an innovative program that would make research more of a priority for residents and make it easier for them to get their research articles published.
He’s excited to be able to influence the careers of these resident physicians. He understands that they will become the physician leaders of tomorrow and that ultimately, they hold the keys to better health care in America.
I’d like to close by sharing some exciting rankings with you that are indicative of the tremendous momentum at UNMC/Nebraska Medicine.
Perhaps not fully appreciated across the college, when they were released last fall, are the patient quality and safety rankings from an organization called Vizient (formerly the University Health System Consortium).
This organization uses a multitude of clinical data provided from hospitals to assess their success in providing high quality care to their patients. Three years ago, UNMC/Nebraska Medicine ranked 92nd out of more than 100 academic medical centers and 124 community hospitals. Two years ago, we moved up to 62nd. Then last year we moved to 10th. Such a rapid climb in the rankings is almost unheard of, particularly since each organization strives to improve each year and thus the bar is raised annually.
Rankings like this don’t just happen. A tremendous amount of work goes into them. This success was due to a large coordinated and concerted effort on the part of our providers, staff, and data support teams at Nebraska Medicine to improve our performance, as well as to appropriately document the complexity of the patients who seek care at Nebraska Medicine.
This year’s rankings will not come out until September, but I am confident that we will again be up to the task. Thanks to everyone for their continued efforts to make patient quality and safety a priority.
I also wanted to share some exciting rankings news on the research front. Dr. Jennifer Larsen, the vice chancellor for research, just made available some recent data on UNMC’s success in attracting research funding from NIH.
For the first time, NIH rankings for every college at UNMC improved. The change for the College of Medicine was truly remarkable. From 2015 to 2016, NIH funding increased more than 25 percent going from $47.5 million to $59.7 million.
This moved us from 61st place nationally to 55th. These rankings do not factor in the size of the faculty competing for these grants. I suspect that if such standardized data were available, UNMC – which is not as large as many other research-intensive medical schools – would rank even higher.
Congratulations to each of our faculty, staff and students who have contributed to the growing success of our research programs.