This is the last of a three-part series introducing readers to the newly appointed senior vice president for Medicine and dean of the UAB Heersink School of Medicine, Anupam Agarwal, M.D. (read part one and part two.) For this installment, we talked with Agarwal to learn more about his vision and goals for the Heersink School of Medicine.
What do you see as the role(s) of the Heersink School of Medicine in our state and region? Does the school have a special responsibility because of our state’s unique needs and demographics?
The economic impact we have, as a school and as a health system, puts us in a strong position to give back to our state and our region. That’s true at all levels—people depend on us for health care, for new innovations and treatments, and for training the next generation of physicians.
I think dealing with the rural health care crisis is a fundamental obligation we have to our state. People in some of our rural communities sometimes have to drive 50 or 100 miles to see a doctor. Training physicians to practice in rural areas, which is one of the aims of our regional campuses, is a big part of our response. The Primary Care Track at our regional campus in Tuscaloosa, which graduated its first cohort last year, is devoted to that goal with 65% of the students entering primary care residency programs. The Rural Medicine Scholar programs also continue to develop our students for primary care careers in rural and medically underserved areas of our state.
A lot of what we’re doing with telemedicine is aimed at helping rural hospitals stay open. Nationally, rural hospitals are shutting down at an alarming rate, and this was happening even before COVID. Our telemedicine programs through the leadership of Dr. Eric Wallace have made a big difference in keeping the doors open at several rural hospitals here in Alabama.
For example, we have a tele-nephrology service at Whitfield Regional Hospital in Demopolis where we can do a tele-consult 24/7 and the patient can get much needed care at that hospital. Before, they would transfer the patient in an ambulance to UAB, which also ties up that area’s sole ambulance for a major part of the day. So, we really want to enhance capabilities in rural hospitals across the four corners of Alabama.
What do you think the Heersink School of Medicine’s greatest strengths are?
Our people are our greatest strength. We have highly talented and committed faculty and staff as well as medical students, graduate students, residents, postdoctoral and clinical fellows, our nursing staff, our APPs (advanced practice providers)—our people at every level are high quality. They have a shared vision and goals that are aligned with our institution with a collaborative spirit, and that is the great strength we have.
Our strengths tie in nicely with the ‘Three Es’ that Dr. Marnix Heersink talked about when he made the naming gift to our school. We are extremely committed to Excellence in everything we do; to being Encompassing and inclusive; and to being Expansive and having a hunger for growth to do the very best for our state and region.
What do you think the Heersink School of Medicine’s greatest growth opportunities are?
In clinical care, the new cancer facility that’s being planned is a huge growth opportunity. In many ways we have maximized our footprint here in Birmingham, so we have to think smarter for both short- and long-term solutions.
I think there’s a lot of potential to implement initiatives such as the Hospital at Home program. This type of program allows patients with particular conditions to be cared for in their homes, so they don't have to come to the emergency room. Ongoing work by our leaders in UAB Medicine will enable our first Hospital at Home patient hopefully in July of this year.
Given the physician shortage across the state and across the nation, we need to train more doctors and this is something we will actively explore. We have to make sure we have enough preceptors for third- and fourth-year medical students for their clinical training. With our successful recent eight-year LCME re-accreditation, I think it’s a good opportunity for us to explore a strategy for growing our medical student class size.
In research, we have recently completed a strategic plan and identified four key research priority areas: D-TECH (Disruptive Technology Empowering Precision Health), Health Equity, I-4ward (Infection, Inflammation, Immunity, and Immunotherapy), and Brain Health and Disease Across the Lifespan. These offer us a blueprint to focus on our core growth opportunities.
And soon we’ll be kicking off a clinical strategic planning effort, which will enable us to identify growth opportunities as well. And with new initiatives in artificial intelligence and digital health being led by our Marnix Heersink Institute for Biomedical Innovation, there are even more opportunities for innovation in health care delivery.
What are your goals for the first year of your deanship?
First is working closely with the health system to make sure our alignment is stronger than ever. And in that we have great partners in Dawn Bulgarella (CEO of the UAB Health System and CEO of the UAB/Ascension St. Vincent’s Alliance) and Reid Jones (CEO of UAB Medicine). In the first year, we have to increase capacity and improve patient access particularly for our emergency department and intensive care units. We will continue to work closely with our partners in the health system to address that challenge.
On the research side, we have a roadmap with the recent strategic plan, but now we have to focus on implementing on the key recommendations from the task forces for the four priority areas.
On the education side, we successfully completed our LCME accreditation but we have to address and work on a few citations. Our goal will be to ensure our students continue to have an exceptional experience with enhanced pathways for accessibility and success.
I am looking forward to visiting our three regional campuses to meet with faculty, staff, students, and hospital leadership. I’m also looking forward to having regular meetings with medical students every other month and also with faculty, as informal ‘meet the dean’ conversations.
Also, I’d like to tour our campus within the Heersink School of Medicine to see firsthand what's happening at various locations and listening to the faculty and staff.
Across UAB Medicine, wellness continues to be a key focus. The 2022 UAB Medicine Pulse Survey results revealed wellness challenges that faculty, staff, and trainees are grappling with. While the roots of the problems started before 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and deepened these challenges, and I recognize that we must continue eliminating sources of workplace frustration. We will be actively collaborating with UAB and UAB Medicine leaders to make the necessary improvements.
Five years from now, what would you like to look back and see has been accomplished?
First, I’d love to see that we are the number one destination for clinical care for our state. Secondly, that we have grown our research programs, not just in NIH rankings but all our research programs. I’d also like to see growth in clinical trials, because that will bring new therapies and options for our patients. There's huge opportunity for us to grow in that area but we have to enhance our infrastructure to be able to meet that goal.
I also want us to continue to be the top choice for medical education in our state and train more students. I think the next five years is a reasonable timeline to increase the number of medical students in a stepwise fashion.
I want us to continue to invest in our people, both by supporting currently funded projects and programs and by investing in recruitment. We want to recruit 100 new faculty investigators by 2030, and our recent past shows it can be done—we doubled our NIH funding and added 100 new investigators in the last eight-to-nine years.
Our partnership with Southern Research is one I want to further strengthen over the next five years. Under new leadership with Josh Carpenter as their CEO, they have ambitious plans for a new state-of-the-art building, and our new Altec/Styslinger Genomic Medicine and Data Sciences Building will be a hub for several of their priority areas like drug discovery, data sciences, and informatics, so they're going to be a close partner with us.
I'd love to grow our fundraising efforts and see our endowed chairs and professorships grow by 25 percent over the next five years. I'd also like to see some of our departments and institutes be named.
Finally, I would like for every single trainee, staff, and faculty member to be as excited as I am about our mission and impact, and to identify the Heersink School of Medicine and UAB Medicine as a great place to work.