Strengthening the school's funding base helps insure that it will continue to make valuable contributions to advancements in medical education, research and patient care, she said. The PLME integrates wide-ranging undergraduate studies with biomedical courses. In an arrangement that is rare in higher education, biology faculty and those in the School of Medicine are combined under one division, sharing basic science training and undergraduate biology instruction. In 1996, the medical school unveiled a major curriculum reform called MD2000. This competency-based curriculum emphasizes mastery of nine crucial abilities that focus on the things a good doctor must be able to do.
Effective communication tops the list.
One of the nation's youngest medical schools, Brown is one of the few that does not own or operate its own teaching hospital. Medical education is a joint endeavor between the school and seven affiliated hospitals. However, the challenges of practicing academic medicine in the current health care environment are greater than ever, with increased pressure on physicians to maintain revenues by seeing more patients. That leaves less time and opportunity for teaching and research, she said. The biomedical and life sciences are the world's fastest growing fields of scientific inquiry.