Internal medicine or general internal medicine is the medical specialty dealing with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of internal diseases. Doctors specializing in internal medicine are called internists, or physicians in Commonwealth nations. Internists are medical specialists that are skilled in the management of patients who have undifferentiated or multi-system disease processes. Internists care for hospitalized (inpatient) and ambulatory (outpatient) patients and may play a major role in teaching and research. Internists are qualified physicians with postgraduate training in internal medicine and should not be confused with "interns", a term for doctors in their first year of residency training.
Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals and allied health fields. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, optometry, audiology, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, athletic training, and other health professions all constitute health care. It includes work done in providing primary care, secondary care, and tertiary care, as well as in public health.
Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is a medical school and research center in Houston, Texas, within the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center. BCM is composed of four academic components: the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the School of Health Professions, and the National School of Tropical Medicine.
Louis Wade Sullivan is an active health policy leader, minority health advocate, author, physician, and educator. He served as the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services during President George H. W. Bush's Administration and was Founding Dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine.
The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) is a public academic health science center in Galveston, Texas. It is part of the University of Texas System. UTMB includes the oldest medical school in Texas, and has about 11,000 employees. In February 2019, it received an endowment of $560 million.
The Commonwealth Fund is a private U.S. foundation whose stated purpose is to "promote a high-performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society's most vulnerable, including low-income people, the uninsured, and people of color." It is active in a number of areas related to health care and health policy. It is led by David Blumenthal, M.D.
The American College of Physicians (ACP) is a national organization of internists, who specialize in the diagnosis, treatment, and care of adults. With 161,000 members, ACP is the largest medical-specialty organization and second-largest physician group in the United States, after the American Medical Association. Its flagship journal, the Annals of Internal Medicine, is considered one of the five top medical journals in the United States and Britain.
Medical education is education related to the practice of being a medical practitioner, including the initial training to become a physician and additional training thereafter.
Joseph J. Fins, M.A.C.P., F.R.C.P. is an American physician and medical ethicist. He is chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College, where he serves as The E. William Davis Jr., M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics, and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry. Fins is also Director of Medical Ethics and an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Fins is also a member of the adjunct faculty of Rockefeller University and has served as Associate for Medicine at The Hastings Center. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton to The White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and currently serves on The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law by gubernatorial appointment.
The Academy of Medical Sciences is an organisation established in the UK in 1998. It is one of the four UK National Academies, the others being the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society.
Western University of Health Sciences (WesternU) is a private medical school and health sciences university with its main campus in Pomona, California, with an additional osteopathic medical school in Lebanon, Oregon. With an enrollment of 3,814 students (2020–21), WesternU offers more than twenty academic programs in multiple colleges.
The University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) is a public academic health science center in Omaha, Nebraska. Founded in 1869 and chartered as a private medical college in 1881, UNMC became part of the University of Nebraska System in 1902. Rapidly expanding in the early 20th century, the university founded a hospital, dental college, pharmacy college, college of nursing, and college of medicine. It later added colleges of public health and allied health professions. One of Omaha's top employers, UNMC has an annual budget of $841.6 million for 2020 to 2021, and an economic impact of $4.8 billion.
Uwe Ernst Reinhardt was a professor of political economy at Princeton University and held several positions in the healthcare industry. Reinhardt was a prominent scholar in health care economics and a frequent speaker and author on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the future of Medicare.
Christine K. Cassel is a leading expert in geriatric medicine, medical ethics and quality of care. She is planning dean of the new Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine. Until March 2016, she was president and CEO of the National Quality Forum. Previously, Cassel served as president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the ABIM Foundation.
Mark Kuczewski is an American philosopher and bioethicist who has been a key contributor to the New Professionalism movement in medicine and medical education. In general, interest in professionalism has been widespread in medicine probably owing to the increasing regulatory and economic pressures on the practice of medicine. Many physicians have sought to identify the focal meaning of what it is to be a doctor in an effort to revitalize the profession. Kuczewski has been among a group that includes Richard and Sylvia Creuss, John Coulehan, and Matthew Wynia who see medical professionalism as including a commitment to social justice. That is, while professionalism entails such things as etiquette, communication skills, and basic medical ethics, professions are also expected to be leaders in educating the public and in advocating for the health of the public. Such leadership requires an understanding of the factors that lead some patient populations to be underserved and a commitment to bringing about social change to ameliorate these problems. The New Professionalism movement in medicine is a revival of communitarian bioethics that focus on the kinds of people and society we wish to be rather than on particular ethical questions of right and wrong. This focus on the relationship between the professional and the community can have important implications for medical education and professional development. While not eschewing case analysis and problem solving, the emphasis on the development of the person has created a renewed interest in narrative methods and reflection. Kuczewski has been an outspoken critic of efforts in medical education to focus on quantitative measures of professionalism education. He has argued that in an effort to make professionalism education “objective,” many medical educators are equating professionalism with trivial but easily measured behaviors. Kuczewski’s interest in professionalism and social justice has led him to pursue ethical issues in the interactions between medicine and recent immigrant populations. He has brought his work in communitarian and casuistic methods to bear on questions such as medical repatriation, insurance for undocumented immigrants, and the eligibility of DREAMers to become practicing physicians. His scholarship and advocacy was the catalyst for the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine becoming the first medical school in the United States to explicitly welcome applications from DREAMers with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status. Under Kuczewski’s direction, the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy at Loyola University Chicago has become a leader in educational programming to promote the relationship between medical professionalism and social justice. The Neiswanger Institute has contributed elements to the Stritch curriculum that explore the relationship between the business of medicine and social justice. The Institute also has online master of arts and doctoral programs that incorporating public health and leadership training in order to help health care professionals across the United States to promote service to the underserved. Kuczewski was elected president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and served a two-year term from 2009 to 2011. The ASBH is the major professional association in the United States for individuals engaged in bioethics and medical humanities. During his term, the society aggressively began moving toward a process called Quality Attestation that will attest to the credentials and expected competence of clinical ethics consultants.
The Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health is the public health graduate school of Columbia University. Located on the Columbia University Medical Center campus in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, the school is recognized by the Council on Education for Public Health.
David Muller, M.D., is known for co-founding in 1996 the Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors Program (VDP), that, as of 2011, is the largest academic physician home visiting program in the country. He is Dean for Medical Education and the Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Chair in Medical Education at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and Associate Professor of both Medicine and Medical Education.
David Jay Rothman was professor of Social Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He also served as the president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP). Rothman's work focused on the social history of American medicine and current health care practices. His research also explored human rights in medicine, including organ trafficking, AIDS, and the ethics of research in developing countries.
Knowledge translation (KT) is the activities involved in moving research from the laboratory, the research journal, and the academic conference into the hands of people and organizations who can put it to practical use. Knowledge translation is most often used in the health professions, including medicine, nursing, pharmaceuticals, rehabilitation, physical therapy, and public health.
The John A. Hartford Foundation is a private United States-based philanthropy whose current mission is to improve the care of older adults. For many years, it made grants for research and education in geriatric medicine, nursing and social work. It now focuses on three priority areas: creating age-friendly health systems, supporting family caregivers and improving serious illness, and end-of-life care.
