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Health information technology (health IT), including electronic health records (but much, much more), enables health care providers--from individual clinicians to widely networked health care organizations--to better manage patient care through streamlined sharing of health information. Since 2004, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has led U.S. efforts to deploy advanced health IT in order to improve clinical service delivery and support patient engagement. As a result, nearly every hospitalization and most doctor visits now have a digital footprint, and an extraordinary amount of health data exists that simply didn't a decade ago. The health IT goal now is to foster seamless and secure data sharing to improve the health and care of individuals and populations alike.
In this special Medical Center Hour, Dr. Vindell Washington, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, introduces this key national initiative and cites the promise and chief challenges for this increasingly central component of our nation's health care system.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
What happens when an extroverted six-year-old dog and her introverted human partner enter the local public nursing home as a therapy dog team? This was the question writer Sue Halpern (nervously) asked herself when she and her dog Pransky began their work at the Helen Porter Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Middlebury VT. In this Medical Center Hour, Halpern revisits the remarkable experiences she and Pransky had over six years with the nursing home residents, experiences that continued even after Pransky's health declined. She also speaks to the increasingly recognized value of introducing therapy animals into medical settings and the significant physical and emotional benefits that follow—for patients, staff, and therapy teams.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Thirty-five years after the discovery of AIDS, the story of this disease and the momentous scientific, medical, political, and social changes it occasioned is rich and complicated, even sensational. In 1981, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, a young UCLA immunologist, saw--and published a New England Journal of Medicine article about--a cluster of five cases of immune dysfunction and unusual opportunistic infections in gay men. Not long after, as personal physician to Hollywood actor and AIDS patient Rock Hudson, Dr. Gottlieb became the medical face of this terrifying epidemic.
In this Medical Grand Rounds/Medical Center Hour, Dr. Bruce Hillman, a medical school classmate of Michael Gottlieb, probes the war of egos, money, academic power, and Hollywood clout that advanced AIDS research in its first decade even as it compromised the medical scientist who discovered the disease. Dr. Hillman draws on interviews with Dr. Gottlieb and others to chronicle one of the most important and contentious medical discoveries of our time.
Medical Grand Rounds/History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine and the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series of Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
Nalini Nadkarni is known as "The Queen of the Rainforest Canopy," being a pioneer in the field of forest canopy research and in public engagement about the plants and animals that live in the treetops. Her interest in rainforest dynamics and in the response of rainforests to disturbances such as harvesting, fire, and climate change has led her to invite input from experts in diverse other fields that also study disruption and recovery--economics, neuroscience, refugee studies, human development, and traffic engineering, to name a few. Exchanges with these experts have given Professor Nadkarni novel insights into theory and models that foster better understanding of disturbance, recovery, and resilience.
Unexpectedly, in 2015, this work also proved personally useful as Professor Nadkarni recovered from extensive trauma sustained when she fell 50 feet from the top of a tree while doing forest canopy fieldwork. In this Medical Center Hour/Medical Grand Rounds, she shares her insights and offers applications for medicine--especially, to the specifics of critical care, and, more generally, to healing.
Medical Grand Rounds / A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine
How might the creative arts, as a symbolic and emotional language, help improve well-being in late life? Anne Basting is an acclaimed practitioner and advocate of using the arts to address issues in aging. In this Medical Center Hour, she explores her own creative research and the most promising new practices for improving the lives of elders and caregivers alike.
The Koppaka Family Foundation Lecture in the Medical Humanities
Co-presented with the Southern Gerontological Society Annual Meeting
Chocolate has been special to human beings for millennia. In our time and culture as in earlier centuries and other cultures, claims abound regarding chocolate's health effects, positive and otherwise. What is it about chocolate—chemically and culturally—that makes it so distinctive in our diets, our emotional lives, our celebrations? Why do we love it so, and what does it do to/for us? In this Medical Center Hour, local chocolatier Tim Gearhart offers insights into chocolate's appeal and effects and gives a glimpse of the craft of artisan chocolate-making.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
In 1943, Albert Schatz, a young PhD student at New Jersey's Rutgers Agricultural College, was working on a wartime project testing bacteria from farmyard soil when he discovered streptomycin, a new antibiotic that was the first effective drug against the global killer tuberculosis. Schatz’s professor, Selman Waksman, claimed all credit for the discovery, calling Schatz a mere bench worker, and secretly enriched himself with royalties once the drug was patented by pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck. Schatz fought back in what was one of the most vicious battles ever for credit of a major scientific discovery. Schatz won the title of "co- discoverer" and a share of the royalties, but, in 1952, Waksman alone was awarded a Nobel Prize. Schatz disappeared into academic obscurity.
This Medical Center Hour features journalist Peter Pringle, whose recent book Experiment Eleven probes this gripping, scandalous story and its diverse global repercussions— for scientific inquiry and mentoring, for research ethics, and for the evolution of Big Pharma.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
Alice Dreger’s newest book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, had its origins in social and scientific controversies having to do with the politics of sex, especially social and medical treatment of so-called intersex individuals. Ms. Dreger’s investigations into this aspect of human identity and intersex rights engaged her with both sides of a heated debate and also with issues of freedom and justice in science. As she says, “Science and social justice require each other to be healthy, and both are critically important to human freedom. . . . [P]ursuit of evidence is probably the most pressing moral imperative of our time. All of our work as scholars, activities, and citizens of democracy depends on it. Yet it seems that, especially when questions of human identity are concerned, we’ve built up a system in which scientists and social justice advocates are fighting in ways that poison the soil on which both depend. It’s high time we think about this mess we’ve created, about what we’re doing to each other and to democracy itself.”
In this Medical Center Hour, Ms. Dreger addresses these concerns—for science, justice, and academic freedom—at a time when pursuit of knowledge can clash with established interests, worldviews, and ideas about social progress.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
In the making of a doctor, the residency is the principal formative experience. Its three to nine years of supervised practical learning are the crucible in which medical graduates acquire specialty knowledge and skills, forge a professional identity, and develop the values, attitudes, and behaviors for a lifetime of practice. While there have long been tensions within and around residency, physician-historian Kenneth Ludmerer's new book, Let Me Heal, a history of residency in the U.S. since its 19th century origins, comes at a time when training programs are pressured as never before by government regulation, workforce changes, shifts in disease patterns and sites of care, and highly commercialized health care. In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Ludmerer mines the history of residency for lessons to address current concerns about medical education and to assure we can make the best doctors for the 21st century.
The Joan Echtenkamp Klein Memorial Lecture in the History of the Health Sciences
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
In 1984, Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign introduced the theme “Morning in America," promoting an image of the U.S. as a hopeful nation moving toward a better future. As one campaign advertisement asserted, “It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better.” Fast forward to 2016. “Hopeful” or making the country “prouder" aren't descriptors most Americans would apply to either this presidential campaign or the contenders. One day post-election, what do experts think will be the “better future” under our new President and Congress? And how might the new President’s health care agenda be felt in the Commonwealth of Virginia?
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
