1. < Uncategorized

[Intro: This week I share updates on each of our pillars in the UCLA Department of Medicine Strategic Plan]

Education | New Companion to Proceedings of the UCLA Department of Medicine Will Launch This Fall 

The education pillar of the strategic plan calls us to develop leaders who will drive the future of medicine and health sciences. In service of this goal, in November 2024 we rebranded and relaunched the department’s longstanding academic journal to document faculty creativity, Proceedings of the UCLA Department of Medicine, on Cureus, an open-source platform by Springer Nature. The journal has published 85 articles in the year since, and while it is still ramping up, the team has learned much about how it can be leveraged to best serve our faculty in the DoM.   

“There have been some challenges, but Proceedings has been instrumental in promoting faculty within the UC system,” Editor-in-Chief Michael E. Lazarus, MD, said. He noted that one faculty member in the rheumatology division has published seven clinical vignettes so far — an aspirational achievement.  

To complement Proceedings, this fall Dr. Lazarus and his team will launch a companion peer-reviewed publication called The Department of Medicine Clinical Insights on the University of California-sponsored open-access publishing platform eScholarship. DoM Clinical Insights will serve as a venue for scholarly work in formats beyond traditional academic writing, including visual diagnosis pearls, narrative medicine essays, clinical reasoning cases, and summaries of quality improvement projects. Word count and author requirements will be different than for Proceedings, and it will eventually include a repository of clinical photos and videos that faculty can use to educate students and trainees.  

“That can provide a means of teaching visual diagnosis skills that is more meaningful and more easily assimilated by our new learners or younger learners with different learning styles, because it doesn’t require reading pages of text,” Dr. Lazarus explained.  

“Ultimately, it will give faculty more options for different kinds and formats of creativity,” he said.  

Stay tuned for more information about DoM Clinical Insights in the next couple of months.   

Community Engagement & Investment | DoM LA Summit Will Bring Together Department and Community Partners 

Initiatives under the community engagement and investment pillar of the strategic plan serve the goal of advancing health and improving outcomes for our diverse L.A. communities. To that end, this year the DoM and our community partners are coming together for the inaugural DoM LA Summit, a daylong event on Sept. 29 at the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center that will feature success stories and lessons learned from DoM community partnerships, music and art activities, and opportunities to foster new collaborations.   

“We're trying to create a space that really centers the many ways that people within our department are practicing community engagement,” Dr. Casillas said. For instance, Chief of the UCLA Division of Digestive Diseases Eric Esrailian, MD, MPH will give a talk on his experience in advocacy among the Armenian community, and National Clinical Scholars Program fellow Walter Solorzano, MD will share what he and his mentor Estelle M. Everett, MD have learned from establishing a diabetes care program at Venice Family Clinic. Daniel Kozman, MD, MPH’s work expanding UCLA’s faculty and trainee footprint at federally qualified health centers with which we do not yet have official partnerships will be highlighted as well. 

“He has created educational and patient care opportunities in these important community settings, and we now know that it’s not only good for patients and community service, but it’s even good for retention — our faculty are happier when they have that opportunity to be able to serve in those settings,” Dr. Casillas said. “It makes their job more enjoyable.”  

Other work that will be presented includes Edward K. Hui, MD's community engagement at the Chinatown Service Center and Courtney L. DeCan, MD, MPH's La Vida weight management program at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. 

To cap it all off, the power of community will be illustrated in a special interactive art project called “Roots of LA” to which all attendees can contribute. A department staff member who is also a muralist will help participants create a tree that includes illustrations of each of their connections to Los Angeles and the DoM.  

“Hopefully we’ll have a visual representation of all of us connecting to the DoM in some way,” Dr. Casillas said.  

Ultimately, the summit is not a one-day event, but is a gathering of minds that will help us plan for the department’s future community engagement efforts. If you have not already signed up to take part in the event, you can do so by following this link.  

Patient Care | New Operational Standards for Ambulatory Clinics Are in the Making 

Our ambulatory care presence consists of more than 800 faculty spread across around 130 ambulatory facilities, giving us an enormous reach with the opportunity to provide world-class care to thousands of people. To meet our goal of strengthening our clinical infrastructure and operational efficiencies — an objective under the patient care pillar of the strategic plan — we are in the process of establishing new operational standards for ambulatory clinics.  

To figure out how to create guidelines that work for everyone, Kia, Dr. Borenstein and their team have been conducting surveys of staff in many of our ambulatory specialty clinics to understand how their process works currently. This information was shared with Division leadership, whose feedback will be used to draw up standards that are inclusive of our healthcare providers’ needs and preferences.  

“Doctors do different things different ways, and building consensus is a large part of any of these interventions,” Dr. Borenstein noted. “It’s about creating a playbook for the teamwork that is the essence of medicine.”  

The guidelines are not yet finished, and implementation remains a long way off, but Dr. Borenstein and his team already have some ideas in place. For one, patients who arrive at any ambulatory clinic in the healthcare system undergo the same procedures that are currently performed by staff for primary care providers, including blood pressure checks, medication reviews, and obtaining relevant documentation. On top of the routine procedures, specialists may require the collection of additional information based on guidelines for their specific medical discipline. Feedback from each division has been shared amongst them to create a forum for shared learning.  

On top of the primary care set of tests, specialists will conduct additional required tests based on guidelines for their specific medical discipline. The entire menu of test will be visible to faculty across specialties — raising the possibility that specialists will learn from each other.  

“The specialists know what they need, but they may not know that there are other options to help with the workflows related to patient care,” Dr. Borenstein said. “They're not learning their specialty from us, but they may be learning optional things that are helpful from other specialties.” 

Dr. Borenstein acknowledged that some specialists may worry that conducting the same tests as primary care physicians will infringe on the time they need to take specialty-specific assessments. These sorts of issues will be ironed out as implementation unfolds.  

“It’s an iterative learning process that will make us a much wiser organization than we were at the beginning,” he said.  

In the end, new operational standards will go a long way in clarifying expectations, boosting efficiency and, in turn, improving out both patients’ and healthcare providers’ experiences in the clinic. 

“Medicine is a demanding profession. It doesn’t matter what role you have — the standards are high, the stakes are high, and efficiency is critically important for fidelity,” Dr. Borenstein said. “Once you have a common understanding, it allows the complex process of medical care to go much more smoothly and reliably.” 

Research | New Websites Will Raise Our Profile

Even as our research objectives face headwinds on account of challenges with federal funding — the latest updates on which you can find here — we remain committed to supporting our faculty and moving forward with the objectives outlined in the research pillar of the strategic plan. That includes our goal of raising the profile of our research faculty and their groundbreaking work, starting with a new set of websites devoted exclusively to promoting their science and forging new collaborations. This initiative is led by the DoM communications team Project Manager Samuel J. Martinez.  

Meanwhile, even amidst a challenging funding environment, several of our faculty were recently awarded NIH grants. While this news is tempered by the fact that a new multi-year funding structure reduces award amounts overall, it is a sign that the agency continues to value our work. We will share more about them in a future newsletter.  

“Our department continues to attract new funding from a wide variety of sources, supporting a broad range of topics and benefiting both early-stage and seasoned investigators. These successes reflect the strength and innovation of our research community,” Dr. Currier said. “Let’s continue to celebrate these achievements, as they fuel our shared mission to advance science and improve human health.”  

P.S.

---