Boston Medical Center, Boston MA
Institutional Training Programs
Contact
Brian Jack, MD
Program Director
Department of Family Medicine
One Boston Medical Center Place
Boston, MA 02118
Email: Brian.Jack@bmc.org
Content Areas
- Health economics.
- Organizational sciences.
- Biostatistics.
- Patient Safety/Quality.
- Health Policy.
- Health Disparities.
- Comparative Effectiveness.
- Systems Redesign.
Program Description
This interdisciplinary predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowship program joins together three highly successful, research fellowship training programs from Boston University School of Medicine and adds a fourth from Boston University School of Public Health. The principal objective of the program is to train emerging researchers in three overlapping domains:
- How health reform impacts urban, low-income families.
- Conduct research that improves the quality of care provided to low-income populations.
- Provide trainees the knowledge and skills to shape future health policy for vulnerable populations.
The training program is based at Boston Medical Center, New England's largest safety-net hospital, and the primary teaching affiliate of the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM). Its principal curricular components include two years of didactic education at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH); an Academic Seminar series that emphasizes fundamental academic skills; bimonthly interdisciplinary Research-in-Progress meetings; the supervised conduct of at least two research projects; a quality improvement curriculum; intensive mentoring; and a workshop in communicating with policy makers. The program's leadership structure combines the strengths of BUSM's Department of Family Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, and Division of General Academic Pediatrics with BUSPH's Department of Health Policy and Management Fellowship training for the proposed program occurs through coursework, mentored research, and specifically tailored fellowship seminars.
Required courses at BUSPH, taught by senior faculty, emphasize epidemiology, biostatistics, quality/safety/outcomes, health economics, organizational sciences, and computing. Accomplished and committed faculty mentors–with institutionally supported protected time–guide fellows through research projects from study inception and design to data collection, analysis, presentation, publication and dissemination of results. Fellows receive specific instruction and guidance on the policy-relevance of their research and choose their mentors based upon shared content and methodological interests. Rounding out the fellows' training, for both predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows, will be academic research seminars, research-in-progress sessions, a hands-on quality improvement project, and a workshop in communicating research findings to policymakers, the press, and the public.