one in use at Harvard Medical School, will grant joint MD/MPH
candidates unique exposure to experiences and experts that
will help shape future leaders in healthcare. In addition, the
program will expand Baton Rouge General’s role as a teach-
ing hospital and, it is hoped, Tulane Medical School’s reputa-
tion as a premier program. The long term goal is to guarantee
a pipeline for future healthcare leaders in the state and con-
tinue the transformation of Baton Rouge into a center of med-
ical education and research. While this program is unique,
coming on the heels of the announcement and subsequent
approval of the LSU/Our Lady of the Lake joint medical edu-
cation venture, there certainly appears to be a trend in the
making. Tulane School of Medicine Senior V.P. and Dean Dr.
Benjamin Sachs says the plan has profound implications for
the city of Baton Rouge. “If you look at cities that have major
teaching hospitals and what it does for the economy–it
attracts people to the city and affects the kind of people that
come. I think there is a small cadre of physicians who are pas-
sionate about being change agents, but you need a major
teaching hospital to do it.”
The first ten Tulane students to participate in the program
arrive on the Baton Rouge General Mid-City campus this May,
which is somewhat of a feat as discussions about a possible
affiliation between Tulane and the hospital were initiated only
a year ago. “What I find really refreshing is how rapidly this
affiliation has gone from discussion to fruition,” said Baton
Rouge General’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Floyd “Flip”
Roberts. “But it would not have gotten launched early on if not
for a key individual who is new to the mix in Louisiana and
who has made a huge difference.” That individual is Dr.
Sachs, who, when discussions began, had only been at
Tulane a little over 18 months. Sachs came to Tulane from
Harvard Medical School with close to 30 years of experience
with the Harvard teaching hospital system. Harvard’s medical
school does not own or run its own teaching hospital. Instead
Massachusetts General, Brigham & Women’s, Beth Israel
Deaconess, and the Children’s Hospital operate as Harvard
affiliated independent teaching hospitals, said Sachs. They
manage their own operations but they benefit by having the
Harvard name and the pipeline of physicians. According to
Roberts, Baton Rouge General had long wanted to expand its
role as a teaching hospital and had been seeking that sort of
affiliation for almost 20 years, so they were quick to jump on
the idea presented by Sachs. “I think these kinds of relation-
ships only work if there is a shared vision,” said Sachs. “The
fact that we were able to put this together so quickly speaks
strongly about us.”
Sachs’ vision is driven by the growing shortage of physicians
in the United States. Although medical schools have expand-
ed their classes and there are more new medical schools
coming on line this year, the number of graduate medical edu-
cation (GME) spots in the country has not expanded. A grow-
ing bottleneck could pose a problem in terms of recruiting
physicians, said Sachs. That’s a potential issue for Louisiana,
which has an older cohort of physicians (particularly in New
Orleans where the average age is 55+), and will have to com-
pete with the rest of the country. The ideal solution is to train
more doctors locally as many stay to practice in the area they
received their medical degree, but Sachs also said there is
general agreement among medical school deans across the
country that they are not training the right kind of doctors.
“We’re training physicians to be a continuation of the past,
which is that they are individualists, they work alone, and they
don’t have all of the skill sets that they need in order to be
physicians,” said Sachs. “We need to train physicians to think
of themselves more as team players, to be part of the health-
care team, because clinical medicine has become so sophis-
ticated and requires a multidisciplinary approach to patient
care. We fail to inculcate that in our medical students and res-
idents.” Sachs also recognizes the need to train more health-
care leaders–physicians who can adapt to a lead change and
look at the evidence and provide more evidence-based med-
icine.
His solution is the L.E.A.D. Academy, which will be offered to
those students working on both their MD and MPH. Tulane
has a higher number of students working on joint degrees
than any other medical school in the country. The attraction,
said Sachs, is partly due to the reputation of Tulane’s School
of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and the fact that those
degrees can be earned simultaneously in four years, with a lit-
tle extra coursework in the summers. The L.E.A.D. Academy
will bring Tulane Medical students to Baton Rouge General in
We need to train physicians to
think of themselves more as
team players, to be part of the
healthcare team, because
clinical medicine has become
so sophisticated and requires
a multidisciplinary approach to
patient care.
We fail to
inculcate that
in our medical
students and
residents.
-Benjamin Sachs, MD
12
Healthcare Journal of Baton Rouge |
May / June 2010 Issue