The Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program is committed to reviewing applications holistically, with an emphasis on the applicants' commitment to physician-scientist training as evidenced by letters of recommendation, research experiences, GPA, and other academic and community accomplishments.
Dr. Mark Pecker, Clinical Associate Program Director, runs a series of biweekly clinical case-based seminars with the goal of providing students in their research years the opportunity to further develop their skills in clinical reasoning and thus help them maintain familiarity with clinical medicine.
Case Discussion Rounsd (CDR) are modeled after a program initially developed by a former Memorial Sloan Kettering faculty member, Dr. Bernd Gänsbacher, now emeritus at Technische Universität München (Technical University of Munich).
In each CDR session, a student presents a clinical case to a group of their peers incuding: chief complaint, history of present illness, social history, and findings on physical exam. The group discusses key findings in their attempts to decipher the etiology of the patient's signs and symptoms.
The group is then charged with asking the student presenter for laboratory tests and providing an explanation for why they are ordering a specific test. The results of the tests are presented and a differential diagnosis is generated. A final diagnosis is proposed after any additional information has been provided. The student presenter then provides some teaching points about the case, and is asked to delineate key questions that remain unresolved regarding the disease at hand, and the implications these questions have for the treatment of patients and for future clinical investigation. This follow-up discussion usually touches on topics at the frontier of biomedical science, befitting the group's focus on becoming future physician-scientists.
The seminar's focus on pathophysiology, and Dr. Pecker's unrelenting emphasis on mechanisms, are key to the success of the CDR. Creative thinking is encouraged and expected!