1. < Message from the Chair

Last Thursday during Grand Rounds, I had the privilege of presenting the “State of the Department” lecture. Before the presentation I was completely surprised to receive a heart-felt tribute from department leaders congratulating me on my receipt of the Robert H. Williams Distinguished Chair of Medicine Award from the Association of Professors of Medicine. I was moved by the kind words that were shared, and your support motivates me to serve you in my current role, with even more diligence.

Once I regained my composure, I presented an overview of our department’s status with regards to finances, research growth, clinical initiatives and much more.

In this week’s newsletter I will review where we stand as well as our vision for the future.

I would like to start by acknowledging that last week marked the one-year anniversary of the Eaton and Palisades fires that upended so many of our colleagues’ lives and left our L.A. community forever changed. I deeply appreciate all you have done to support each other in the year since, from collecting donations to offering space in your homes to taking on extra shifts and much, much more. Your commitment and care for your colleagues exemplified the humility and compassion that make our department the best in the country, and I am proud to work alongside you. I believe the resilience we cultivated during a very difficult year will help us face whatever challenges are to come this year and in the future.

Our department continues to grow. We are now up to almost 1,400 faculty with primary appointments in the UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM), and an additional 600 affiliate faculty for a total 2,000 faculty in the DoM. We continue to have a strong track record of retention; between 2024 and 2025 we added 173 new faculty for a net gain of 98, the continuation of the pattern we have seen since 2020.

Opportunities for professional growth within the department abound. This year several faculty members were appointed to new leadership roles in their divisions.

The number of patients who come through our doors has grown as well. In 2023 we started out at around 1 million. In 2025 we topped that figure by 150,000, bringing us to just over 1.15 million. We’re seeing 5 to 7% growth year over year, which translates to growth in the number of RVUs generated.

This growth has only been possible thanks to all of your hard work. Your well-being is essential to what we do here, and wellness is of the utmost importance to us. As such, the department with the help of the DoM Office of Wellness has focused on identifying drivers of burnout and putting in place initiatives to address this. I am happy to report that faculty burnout rates overall are declining; as the 2025 Wellness Survey showed, they stand at 46% overall, compared to 50% in 2024, and 60% in 2022. While we celebrate this progress, we acknowledge that there remains much work to be done to improve the well-being of our faculty. 

Burnout rates continue to be higher among women faculty. This is true for all faculty and also for physician-scientists as well. We will continue to focus on understanding the basis of the gender gap and are committed to addressing this.

Given that last year was a tough one for research faculty, it is not surprising that their rates of burnout did not follow the same downward trend as faculty overall.

Our outstanding DoM Division Wellness Champions continue to offer support and resources to those experiencing burnout. They are charged with on-the-ground advocacy and information-gathering, and I encourage you to engage with your Division Wellness Champions so that we can efficiently identify and address ongoing concerns.

Our Division Wellness Champions will also be at the forefront of identifying and implementing Division Local Opportunities for Improvement, or LOFIs. They will work with division leaders and the DoM Office of Wellness to develop LOFIs with measurable outcomes that align with the wellness office’s pillars of communication and transparency; decompression and workload management; activation and engagement; and culture and community-building.

One of our most popular wellness initiatives is the DoM Professional Coaching Program, which offers small-group professional coaching to ameliorate burnout and improve work-life balance. Last year saw some important milestones for this initiative, including the publication of a peer-reviewed clinical trial on its effectiveness. The program opened to research faculty in May 2025 and underwent further expansion in October 2025. I look forward to seeing more of you reap the benefits of this impactful program moving forward. I would like to give a special thanks to our DoM Office of Wellness LEADERS Sun Yoo, MD, MPH and Joshua Khalili, MD. This year showed just how important wellness is to the success of our department, and I am deeply grateful to you for your leadership.

We are one department, but we have multiple missions. As such, the DoM Strategic Plan, represents our roadmap through which our core strategic pillars: research, education, patient care, and community engagement and investment, will be advanced. The objectives within each of these pillars serve our central goal to Lead in Innovation, Transform Care and Advance Health for All.

Regarding extramural research funding, last year was an incredibly challenging year because of cuts to and significant uncertainty around criteria for federal funding, and that may continue to be the case this year. Despite these challenges we continued to apply for NIH grants and to excel in the work that distinguishes us as a leading academic department of medicine.

While National Institutes of Health awards and expenditure remain robust, the unpredictability of the federal funding landscape means we will need to diversify our sources of research funding. Philanthropic funds will be increasingly important, as will industry-funded clinical trials. Clinical trials are the fastest-growing category of our research portfolio year over year; right now, the whale’s share of this growth is driven by hematology-oncology, but we are working with other divisions to grow their clinical trials portfolios moving forward. This will be supported by an initiative launched this past year and led by Raphael J. Landovitz, MD to give DoM investigators the tools they need to launch clinical trials. Learn more about this exciting initiative during a research onboarding session on Jan. 26 or contact Dr. Landovitz for more information at rlandovitz@mednet.ucla.edu.

Even as we diversify our funding sources, we are well-positioned to continue to be competitive for federal and philanthropic grants alike thanks to the exceptional research productivity of our faculty and trainees. For example, this past year our department published 2,800 articles collectively. Four hundred of these were from our trainees, and many of them were in highly competitive and rigorous peer-reviewed journals. We also had another successful Research Day that highlighted the impactful work that goes on in our department.

To build upon our robust recruitment of scientists and academic physicians, we also launched the research faculty onboarding program to help new DoM researchers thrive in their new roles. Additionally, we began sharing weekly research updates to keep everyone updated on developments with federal funding, and we developed a video library that includes conversations with DoM leaders, human resources and compensation administrators to serve as a knowledge base for new faculty and staff. We are also enhancing our ability to share our research discoveries with new research websites that share stories of our scientists’ impact.

Our education pillar continued to shine this year as exemplified by our fantastic residency and fellowship recruitment outcomes. These will be our future colleagues, the ones who build on our successes here at UCLA. We are committed to continuing to train excellent physicians who will care for diverse communities across the country. It may be hard to believe, but we are already just six weeks out from our next residency match. I look forward to continuing our legacy of attracting exceptional physicians.

In November 2025 we celebrated the one-year anniversary of Proceedings of the UCLA Department of Medicine, which is now home to more than 113 case studies and articles that demonstrate our faculty’s creativity. As we celebrated this exciting milestone, the exceptional editorial team behind Proceedings also launched DoM Clinical Insights (DoMCI), a companion publication built on the UC eScholarship platform with a wide array of content types to showcase our clinical scholarship. I am grateful to Editor-in-Chief Michael Lazarus, MD, Senior Editors Dianne S. Cheung, MD, MPH and Ramya R. Malchira, MD and Project Manager Nina Rogers for their outstanding work on these platforms.

As I mentioned, our patient population saw another year of growth. While this was spurred in part by expansions to our ambulatory facilities, it is also a testament to our outstanding reputation. UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center (RRMC) made the U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll, and in all internal medicine specialties included in their rankings, our divisions within the DoM all ranked among the top 10 or 20 in the nation.

We also excelled on in the Vizient ambulatory care rankings for 2025. These primarily focus on academic medicine institutions. We ranked No. 2 overall, close behind NYU. Of the 5 sub-categories that contribute to our Vizient ambulatory scorecard, we ranked No. 1 in quality and continuum of care respectively. We have opportunities to work on access and efficiency. There is much low-hanging fruit in these domains that will help improve our standing, such as streamlining operational protocols that will influence data on the number of clinic cancellations within a certain time frame.

We have many ongoing projects under the patient care pillar that will continue to move us toward our goals this year. Among these priorities are improved access to procedures and testing, standardized practices across our wide network of ambulatory practices, fewer unnecessary hospital visits and improved continuity of care.

We continue to work closely with UCLA Health to ensure coordinated expansion of our ambulatory facilities, which include clinics in West Adams, Long Beach, Inglewood, Pasadena and Atascadero. On the inpatient front, we have already seen a tremendous positive impact on the West Valley community thanks to the expansion of our services at UCLA West Valley Medical Center, where seven of our divisions are currently operating. More are on the way: Endocrinology will launch there on Feb. 1, followed by infectious diseases this summer. Dermatology is fielding consult requests at West Valley through RRMC; palliative care, rheumatology and geriatrics will be launched there at a later date.

We continue to proactively plan for expanded capacity at RRMC when the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital (RNPH) relocates to mid-Wilshire in the near future. Hospital Medicine and Geriatrics will offer on-site consultations to patient at RNPH, while medicine-subspecialists will mainly provide consultations via tele-health.

I would like to share a quick positive story that highlights our impact at West Valley Medical Center. Prior to when our services expanded there in July 2025, patient experience scores for doctor communication were in the first percentile. They jumped to the 11^th percentile in July 2025, and by August were in the 87^th percentile. Thank you to all of our colleagues, particularly our hospitalists at West Valley for providing high-quality patient care!

The DoM made impressive strides this year with regards to our community engagement and investment pillar, a key objective of which is to advance and improve outcomes for our diverse communities. One major highlight was the inaugural UCLA DoM LA Summit on Sept. 29, which brought together leaders, stakeholders and partners from the DoM, the university and our communities to advance shared community-centered health initiatives. This event saw more than 185 attendees that represented 37 community partners and 20 community organizations, with robust attendance from faculty and staff and was highly rated by the vast majority of the 90 attendees who participated in a follow-up survey. We are now in the process of generating a report on the summit and aim to formalize many of the nascent partnerships that were started there. We also hope to form a community advisory board that will guide our future plans.

Another highlight of our progress on our goals under the community engagement pillar was the expansion of partnerships with Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). Here in Westwood, capacity access and restrictions imposed by public payors are challenges that we constantly face as we try to expand our services to historically underserved patients. To overcome these obstacles, we have formed partnerships with safety net institutions including FQHCs that bring our physicians to facilities where underserved and marginalized patients receive care. We strengthened our services at these centers last year and look forward to continuing to do so this year. New expansions and ongoing areas of exploration include the following:

• Chinatown Service Center: Expanded developmental pediatric care and pulmonary care
• Homeboy Industries: Exploring addiction medicine services
• LA LGBT Center: Exploring psychology services and research directorship
• Martin Luther King Jr. Community Healthcare: Added 10 weeks per year of hospitalist teaching and .1 FTE of primary care service
• To Help Everyone Health & Wellness Center: Added rheumatology services one day per month
• Venice Family Clinic: Expanded our pulmonary and sleep medicine services to three half-days per month; added endocrinology two half days per month; added rheumatology two half days per month

Being quantitative people, we were curious as to how working with our safety net partners impacted the wellness of our clinicians, so we conducted a sub-analysis of our department wellness survey to understand the impact of working in the safety net on our faculty wellbeing. Almost everybody said that this work improved alignment with their values, made their job more meaningful and, most impressively, increased their likelihood of wanting to stay here at UCLA to grow their careers. This is a strong indicator that we should continue to build on this work.

Our department’s missions are enriched by our relationship with our affiliate partners, starting with our largest: the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center. We cover nearly all specialties here, both for inpatient and outpatient services, and the VA is a key training partner for residents and fellows. The VA also represents a significant portion of our research portfolio, and funding for research there saw significant year-over-year funding growth for projects and growth in the number of research FTEs that are covered by the VA. We also witnessed a bumper year for junior faculty career development awards, with eight of them awarded to the VA. They have a very rigorous mentorship program there that is manifesting success.

We continue to enjoy robust interactions with our other affiliate partners. At Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, Soma Wali, MD, FACP and hospital leadership have hosted bi-monthly visits with Gregory Brent, MD and other DoM leaders to meet and visit with Olive View-based UCLA faculty and trainees. In addition to building out opportunities for trainees, we are also expanding joint faculty recruitments and research collaborations as well as investing in research infrastructure. We are also in the process of planning a clinical research summit there that will be held later this year.

We are also strengthening our program connections with Kern Medical, a 222-bed safety net tertiary care hospital in Bakersfield that has a 40-year residency partnership with UCLA. In 2025 we launched an internal medicine inpatient rotation for medical students, expanded teaching opportunities and teaching credits for Kern Medical-based faculty, and established a new rotation through which Kern Medical Internal Medicine Residency Program trainees will rotate through the UCLA Division of Geriatrics Santa Monica inpatient service. More exciting developments are to come; later this month the DGSOM Dean, vice deans and select clinical department chairs will meet to expand partnerships for medical student and residency training.

There is much to look forward to in 2026. At the department level, we will strengthen our reputation for providing the best clinical care across all subspecialties, for providing a compelling training environment and curriculum and for offering unparalleled innovation in research. We will also continue to lean into actualizing other goals under the UCLA DoM Strategic Plan, navigate potential shifts in the federal funding landscape and continue to lean into our commitment to mentoring and training the next generation of academic physicians.

At the health system level, we anticipate continued expansion of both ambulatory and inpatient services, as well as clinical integration and funds alignment. As of December, clinical integration of DoM divisions into the health system is complete.

I would like to thank each and every one of you for your service this year and for your continued dedication to our goals. We are committed to open communication and take your feedback seriously, so please feel free to reach out to me and other department leaders at any time.

In closing, I invited our division chiefs to select and share two to three of their most noteworthy achievements from the past year. Enjoy learning about their successes in the slides below!

The state of our department is strong! I am grateful for your leadership, energy, enthusiasm, commitment and collegiality that have all contributed to our accomplishments.

Dale,

P.S.

Each New Year, I like to share a picture of a sunrise to exemplify our hopefulness for good year ahead. This weekend I started my 20K run before dawn to catch sunrise vistas, which I share with you below.

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