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Message from the Dean

Dean Flotte

Terence R. Flotte, MD
Dean of the T.H. Chan School of Medicine

The Celia and Isaac Haidak Professor in Medicine

Executive Deputy Chancellor and Provost

UMass Chan Medical School

This is an exciting time to be pursuing a career in medicine and applying to the UMass Chan Medical School. Our school is in a period of transformational change, which is designed to enable you, as a member of the physician workforce of the future, to improve the health and well-being of the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the world. Our school’s strategic plan defines six specific goals:

  • To design the health care delivery system of the future. The current focus on health care reform provides us an opportunity to help redesign health care systems so they are safer, more effective, more efficient, more timely, more patient-centered and more equitable in improving the health of all of our citizens.
  • To train the health care workforce of the future. As insurance coverage expands, having access to appropriate medical care will depend on increasing the availability of primary care and specialty physicians in all our communities. In response to this need, over the past few years we expanded class size by nearly 25 percent and are working to provide outstanding clinical learning opportunities in various community settings.
  • To create an ideal learning environment. To accommodate the larger class, we expanded and updated our current facilities. Last year we opened the integrated Teaching and Learning Center (iTLC)—a flexible teaching space equipped with state-of-the-art technology to support the new Learner-centered Integrated Curriculum (LInC), which also launched last year. Our anatomy laboratory was renovated in the summer of 2009, incorporating wall-mounted computers at every station to integrate clinical imaging, as well as brighter lights that can also be individually controlled.

We have also begun construction of additional specialized teaching space in the Albert Sherman Center scheduled to open in 2012. These new facilities will include our new state-of-the-art Center for Experiential Learning and Simulation and dedicated space that will be home to our Learning Communities, which are a core feature of LInC, which bring all medical school learning into a patient-oriented context with mixed levels of students and faculty teaching the core competencies of our profession.

  • To translate scientific discovery into practice. The Sherman Center will also house an expansion of the portion of our research enterprise designed to bring UMass Chan discoveries in areas such as RNA interference and gene therapy to the bedside in early phase clinical trials. In addition, the new Ambulatory Care Center, opened in July 2010, will provide state-of-the-art facilities to take those discoveries forward from the bedside to the broader community through clinical and population health research. Our institution’s recent receipt of a highly prestigious NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award will greatly facilitate this process.
  • To become a high-performance, high-reliability enterprise. Our ability to focus on and sustain all of these efforts depends on our supporting all of these activities in the most cost-efficient and technically advanced manner possible. We strive to do this in concert with our clinical partner, UMass Memorial Health Care.
  • To have an impact on the world. We seek to improve health around us, here in Worcester, throughout the commonwealth and around the world. Our students have always played a central role in outreach from UMass Chan. Our recently launched Office of Global Health now helps to coordinate those opportunities and facilitate those efforts.

Finally, we are preparing for our Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) reaccreditation site visit in March 2012. The first step in the reaccreditation process is an in-depth institution-wide self study, in which everyone is engaged in taking an honest hard look at UMass Chan with the goal of continuing to improve our institution. I invite you to participate and contribute to what will be a meaningful and helpful review of UMass Chan.

The essence of our plan is all about the people who make up the UMass Chan community—students, faculty and staff—and our commitment to provide an outstanding medical education. We look forward to learning from each other as we embark on this ambitious journey together. It’s going to be a fun ride.