Member Profile: Dartmouth Medical School

Background

The mission of Dartmouth Medical School is to improve health-locally, nationally, and globally. We do this by educating the leading physicians and scientists of tomorrow, generating new knowledge through research, and empowering all members of our community.

Dartmouth Medical School was founded in 1797 by Nathan Smith, a young physician from Cornish, N.H. It is the nation's fourth-oldest medical school and the first in a rural setting. For a portion of its 212-year history (from 1914 to 1967), the school offered only a two-year basic science curriculum due to the lack of clinical variety in what was then a very rural area; students transferred to other medical schools to complete their education. Since the reintroduction of a full M.D. program in the late 1960s, DMS has risen rapidly to national prominence. Today, the school is at the forefront of an important evolution in medical education, cultivating the kind of doctors the country needs most, with a balanced emphasis on both the science and the art of medicine.

Students are taught to address the patient, not just the disease, and to be alert to practical ways to meet the health-care needs of entire communities. Students gain early and regular clinical experience in settings ranging from community clinics to large tertiary-care facilities. Ethics and humanism suffuse the curriculum. The focus is on developing skills and on igniting in students a passion for lifelong learning, beyond the acquisition of specific information through instruction. Both curricular and extracurricular programs foster humanity and compassion, based on a foundation of thorough knowledge of the biomedical sciences.

Students learn in laboratories and classrooms on three campuses: at Dartmouth Medical School's Hanover, NH, campus, adjacent to the Dartmouth College undergraduate campus (and Dartmouth's two other professional schools-in business and engineering); at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, NH; and at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, VT. Students learn much of their patient care at DHMC, which serves as a tertiary referral center for most of northern New England.

Innovations

1797 - First class matriculated

1811 - First building constructed in the United States for the sole purpose of medical education

1838 - First use in the United States of the stethoscope in medical education, by DMS faculty member Oliver Wendell Holmes

1839 - First black graduate

1896 - First U.S. clinical x-ray

1955 - First U.S. multispecialty ICU

1960 - First female student

1972 - First cancer research and treatment center in northern New England (Norris Cotton Cancer Center)

1981 - First implantable continuous infusion pump in the United States, for the delivery of pain-relieving drugs

1983 - First U.S. autologous bone marrow transplant for acute myeloid leukemia

1990 - First NIH-funded study of the ethical use of genetic information

1993 - First graduate program in the United States in the evaluative clinical sciences (outcomes research)

1994 - First cloning of a gene that stores cholesterol

1995 - First in the East in the number of Native American graduates over the previous 20 years

1996 - First Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care is published

2001 - Micro-RNAs are discovered at DMS

2005 - First vaccine against the human papillomaviruses (HPVs) that cause cervical cancer is proven effective in research at DMS

IT Accomplishments

Computing pioneer George Stibitz was a member of the DMS faculty from 1964 to 1974. In 1937, he had designed the first binary computer, and in 1940, on the Dartmouth campus, he conducted the first demonstration ever of remote computing. He was later recruited to DMS to serve as an information technology consultant to the DMS faculty and to conduct his own research on the interface of computing and biomedicine.

DMS was one of the first medical schools to establish a formal Program in Medical Information Science, in 1984.

In 1985, DHMC developed a custom-designed Clinical Information System (CIS), an early electronic medical record system.

DHMC is currently in the process of transitioning from CIS to the Epic system, a full, online EMR.

Much of the research conducted at DMS has a strong IT component; Dartmouth's Brain Imaging Lab, for example, conducts fMRI studies related to multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia, and neurogenetics.

DMS's Computational Genetics Lab is working to improve the prediction, prevention, and treatment of common diseases-such as cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and psychiatric diseases-through the development, evaluation, and application of statistical and computational methods for genetic, genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic analysis.

DMS's Interactive Media Lab develops advanced distributed learning modules-web-based as well as CD-based-for the medical and public health communities.

The pioneering Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care-which is being cited widely in Washington, DC, in the current debate about health-care reform-is based on a complex statistical analysis of the massive Medicare database. The Atlas has documented glaring variations in the distribution and utilization of health-care resources between otherwise similar communities.

DMS also makes myriad curricular uses of information technology. All students are required to have laptops. Blackboard is used for course management. Students study "virtual microscopy" images in pathology and cytology classes. And a custom-designed program called DMEDS (Dartmouth Medical Encounter Documentation System) tracks and evaluates every clinical encounter of every medical student to ensure quality and consistency across the clinical curriculum. Demographics Private Basic science departments: Anatomy, Biochemistry, Genetics, Microbiology and Immunology, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Physiology Clinical departments: Anesthesiology, Community and Family Medicine, Diagnostic Radiology, Medicine, Neurology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Orthopedics, Pathology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Surgery 320 medical students 275 graduate students (179 PhD, 62 MPH, 34 MS) 32 MD-PhD (included in figures above) 354 residents and fellows Approximately 750 full-time faculty, 1,200 adjunct and part-time faculty, and 240 postdoctoral fellows and research associates.