Education: Creating an ideal physician
Education: Creating the ideal physician
In the summer of 2007, the medical school moved into its new home, a $58.3 million, 162,000-square-foot building—the first edifice on campus with the School of Medicine name on it.  
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       The new building serves as the anchor between two historic buildings that have undergone complete renovation. The new central building includes an airy atrium, designed as the medical school’s “living room,” where an entire medical class can gather easily at one time.edi

The building in the center unites mirror wings that retain the external structure—pink marble, red tile roofs—of the anatomy and physiology buildings constructed soon after the already well-established AtlantaMedical College joined Emory and moved to campus in 1915. This graceful structure curves around a courtyard that faces EmoryUniversity Hospital and is filled with plants and trees.
     Almost four times the size of the historic buildings and filled with state-of-the-art technology and gloriously abundant classroom space, the new building made possible a 15% increase in the size of theNew patient simulators are multi-talented entering class, to 133 students. That should help alleviate the severe U.S. physician shortage projected by the time they graduate in 2011. Another 15% increase in class size is planned within the decade.
     But more important than the number of students entering the new building each year is the kind of physician these young men and women will be when they leave four years later. The class of 2011, the first to know only this building as home, also will be the first to complete their entire medical education within the totally revamped curriculum that the building makes possible.
     The new curriculum, the culmination of years of planning, is designed to create physicians who are passionate about medicine and making a difference and who appreciate the complex, sociologic, psychologic, and economic issues surrounding patients, families, and communities.
     The new building was designed in tandem with this new curriculum, while maintaining flexibility to evolve along with the fast-moving school.


Space to learn, study, mingle
The number of classrooms, the range of classroom size and type, and the technology available to students in each room reflects the curriculum’s emphasis on active learning. Three large auditoriums, each able to seat 160, feature high-definition screens, visible even in natural light, with acoustical panels and theater-style lighting to enhance presentations involving patients. The note-taking service for which medical students are famous is now complemented by automatic recordings of audiovisual and spoken components of each presenter. Four seminar rooms are designed for up to 40 students, with wireless networks linked to the hospital and other facilities. Nineteen rooms hold 20 or fewer students, essential spaces for a new curriculum that has replaced fully half of the old large-group lectures with interactive small-group sessions. Two computer/teaching labs are open around the clock, each with space for up to 75 students. TheseA group of 60 faculty will serve as mentors to each class, following them throughout the curriculum are hard-wired, an extra layer of capacity in a building that is the first on campus to be completely wireless.
Personal space abounds. For years, Emory medical students referred to themselves as the nomads, always in search of a decent place to study, often settling for empty classrooms or local coffee shops. Their new home has space for any study style, solo or group, from cozy spots to spacious lounges, including one with a fireplace. Other spaces encourage informal interaction, between students and between students and faculty: a café, coffee shop, kitchen space with microwaves and refrigerators, eating areas inside and out (one for students only), and lots of comfortable chairs and couches (including a gigantic “sofatorium”). The building also has showers, lockers, indoor parking for bikes, LCD monitors that display an ever-changing array of announcements and activities across campus, even a small soundproof music practice room. (For whatever reason, Emory always has attracted a sizable number of musically talented students, making the big annual talent show an event worth watching.) The only thing missing, by design, is television.
Most of the administrative offices of the school, from the dean’s headquarters to graduate medical education, are also in the new building, with space for the Admissions office almost doubling. Last year, prospective students nervously waited for interviews in makeshift areas in a hallway. This year, they have a spacious lounge with its own terrarium.

Practicing technique and real medicine
The Emory Center for Experiential Learning (ExCEL, for short) contains an unprecedented number of high-fidelity simulators that allow students to acquire and hone technical skills, from basic suturing and resuscitation to intubation, placement of IVs, and delivering a baby. Multi-talented mannequins respond to various therapeutic measures and mimic physiologic and anatomic parameters, including heart, lungs, and airway.
     But good doctors must learn to use everything they have learned—and some things they haven’t—in real, often chaotic medical situations calling for speed, accuracy, teamwork, and sensitivity to patients and families. The building’s four simulation suites are flexible spaces that can be manipulated to include a multitude of scenarios, ranging from an emergency room or intensive care unit to a labor-delivery suite or operating theater.
     Students also learn the complex choreography required when doctors, nurses, and other members of the health care team workSOM lecture hall together. Faculty watch from behind one-way mirrors, while video cameras record the action for later critique.
     Emphasis on learning in a simulated environment continues in the 16 clinical exam rooms, where students conduct “OSCEs” (objective standardized clinical examinations) with actors trained to represent realistic symptoms and to follow scripts illustrating dozens of medical conditions.
     Unprecedented learning opportunities are not just for medicine and allied health students and their counterparts in nursing and other health care professions. Emory’s continuing medical education (CME) program, already one of the largest in the country, will expand in use of simulation—and in the human anatomy facilities described further on. Clinicians in this program can use the experiential center to prepare for rarely seen conditions or events. The center also has resources to develop a multidisciplinary approach to preparedness for natural or bioterrorism disasters.


Learning more from the human body
The new dissection facility in the building is arguably the best anatomy space in any medical school in the world. Each of 26 dissection tables is equipped with computers with access to the Internet, magnetic resonance and other images, study guides, and lecture notes to accompany specific dissections. First-year medical students, working in teams of six, use 22 of the tables, in a revised human anatomy course that reflects the new curriculum’s system approach. The other four are for health professions students, faculty, and residents learning or developing new techniques and for weekend symposia and other CME courses.
 
     
     
         
         
         
      The curriculum in phases  
         
      Foundations of Medicine, the first 18 months of the curriculum, is a whole-person approach combining clinical medicine and basic fundamentals of science, social science, humanities, and public health, co-taught by basic scientists and clinicians working together. It begins with a section on the Healthy Human and concludes with one on Human Disease, in which each organ system is introduced with simulated or real case presentations and matched with the appropriate basic science.
     Within this phase, students begin acquiring clinical experience and skills early on, beginning with a popular “week on the wards” rotation. Students gain increasing in-depth clinical experiences in primary care and in specialty care settings as well.
     After taking part I of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, students enter an Applications phase, with training in basic clinical areas such as internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics/gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, and neurology. One week inter-sessions prior to each block of clinical rotations will highlight basic science knowledge, clinical skills, and ethical issues related to each specialty.
     An in-depth, closely-mentored, mandatory Discovery phase, based on an individual student’s interests, is designed to enhance creativity, curiosity, and leadership abilities. As long as it is related to medicine, students may spend this phase in any field. They may do basic or clinical research, work in public health, or focus on such areas as medical humanities, medical anthropology, or sociology. Five months is the minimum, but some students will elect to spend up to one extra year in Discovery.
     The Translation phase includes clinical rotations in intensive care and emergency medicine and a sub-internship in medicine, surgery, or pediatrics, followed by a Capstone course during the last month of medical school. The Capstone course wraps up and reinforces lessons of the previous four years and prepares the medical student for residency.
     Throughout the entire curriculum, students participate in an extensive mentoring program. Each student is assigned to one of four "societies" and to one of 16 society advisers, who remain matched to their respective students throughout their medical school experience.
 
Students talking by window
         
         
         
         
      Doing well  
         
      SOM GradsAs average MCAT scores keep rising among entering classes, Emory’s 475 students continue to perform extremely well compared with their peers. The most recent pass rate for first-time takers of part 1 of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam was 99%, and the majority of this year’s graduates received their top choices for residency training.
     Emory now has 66 MD/PhD students (including those in a top-ranked biomedical engineering department shared by the medical school and Georgia Tech). The medical school also has 14 MD/MPH students and 420 students in five health professions programs, including a physical assistant program and physical therapy doctoral program ranked third and eighth, respectively, by U.S. News & World Report. In 2007, The Scientist magazine ranked Emory as the eighth best place in the country for postdoctoral fellows to work.
 
         
Match Day Group photo
         
         
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