• MED 21400
  Health, Medicine & Society I: Culture, Health, and Illness / Community Oriented Primary Care
  Spring, 2nd year/3 credits
  3 lecture hours per week, 7 recitation hours per semester.
  Co-requisite: MED 22401
  Duration: 15 weeks
  Course Director: George Brandon, Ph.D.

This course is designed to acquaint students with the basic tools, concepts and methods for the study of health, illness and community life by focusing on the disciplines of medical anthropology and community oriented primary care. By the end of this course students should be able to:

• 
  MED 22401
  Health, Medicine & Society II: Practicum in Community Health Assessment
  Spring, 2nd Year/2 credits
  1 lecture hour, 2 workshop hours per week
  Co-requisite: MED 21400
  Duration: 15 weeks
  Course Co-Directors: George Brandon, Ph.D.
                                  Pyser Edelsack, M.S.W.

Practicum in Community Health Assessment is a one-semester course focusing on quantitative data collection and analytical skills fundamental to the understanding of community-based medicine. The student will learn and apply the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct a Community Health Assessment (CHA).   In this course, students will be required to learn and demonstrate how to:
 
*    Describe a community on the basis of social and environmental factors that affect disease prevalence.  
*    Apply analytic skills to demographic, socioeconomic and health data
    This course employs lectures, workshops, field exercises, and a population laboratory with demographic, socioeconomic, and health data on New York City neighborhoods.

• MED 23400
  Health, Medicine & Society III: Field Work in Community Medicine
  Spring/Summer, 2nd Year/5 credits
  8.5 lecture hours, 4 hours small group sessions, 8.5 laboratory hours and 161.5 field work hours
  Co-requisite: MED 22401
  Duration: 9 weeks
  Course Director: Pyser Edelsack, M.S.W.

The field placement is a structured clerkship that introduces students to an inner-city community and a social or health service agency. Each student works in one of numerous agencies located in the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens or Brooklyn under the dual supervision of the Community Medicine faculty/staff and a provider preceptor. Placement sites include health centers, hospital outpatient services, social welfare agencies, and programs for the elderly, adolescents and children. The course is taught during the spring and summer. Students learn interviewing, screening and advocacy techniques. Students work 20 hours per week in a community-based agency. In addition to their agency responsibilities, students:

1. maintain a log of their activities, their interaction with patients and staff, and their analysis of proposed solutions to problems in their own work and that of the agency;
2. prepare an agency report that examines the background, governance, population served, services and programs, and how the agency is funded;
3. present a case study of a family or individual focusing on the effects of community, social and economic factors on the patient's health;
4. conduct a community survey on a defined population (including questionnaire construction, pilot testing, aggregation and analysis of results).

• MED 33501
  Health, Medicine and Society IV: Fundamentals of Epidemiology
  Fall, 3rd Year/3 credits
  3 lecture hours per week plus 1 hour recitation
  Prerequisites: MED 21400, MED 22401, MED 23400 and Statistics
  Duration: 15 weeks
  Course Director: Nancy Sohler, Ph.D.

This course equips students with the ability to understand and evaluate the impact of environmental, biological, social, and behavioral risk factors on health and disease through the epidemiologic methods. The course uses lectures, small group meetings and assignments to acquaint students with: measures of morbidity and mortality; techniques of epidemiologic surveillance including disease outbreaks; appropriate settings for use of cross-sectional, prospective and retrospective study design as methods to examine disease causation and distribution; calculation of relative risk; sources of bias and variability in studies. Lectures and workshops reinforce student facility with statistical methods used in analyzing and interpreting the medical literature. Small group meetings require students to demonstrate the skills of critical evaluation of epidemiologic evidence.

• MED 41700
  Health, Medicine & Society V: The U.S. Health Care System
  Spring, 3rd Year/3 credits
  4 hours per week
  Prerequisites: MED 21400, MED 22401 and MED 23400 and MED 33501
  Duration: 11.5 weeks
  Course Director: Marthe Gold, M.D.

This course provides students with the knowledge and skills to critically examine how the U.S. health care system and policy-making apparatus influence the health of Americans. In lectures and small groups, students study the epidemiology of behavioral and environmental risk in U.S. sub-populations, the structure of the health system and medical insurance, and the role of public health, medicine and primary care in influencing health outcomes. Social and political factors of particular relevance to underserved, low income, and minority populations are emphasized. Students are required to develop presentations and written papers for seminars, where topics presented in the readings and lectures are explored in greater depth. In concert with skills previously acquired in Fundamentals of Epidemiology MED 33501 students completing this course will emerge with an understanding of study design as it informs medical outcomes and health services research.

• MED 42700
  Patient-Doctor Sequence I
  Fall, 4th Year/1 credit
  5 hours per week (15 hour per semester)
  Duration: 3 weeks
  Course Director: Darwin Deen, M.D.

• MED 42800
  Patient-Doctor Sequence II
  Spring, 4th Year/3 credits
  5 hours per week (100 hours per semester)
  Duration: 20 weeks
  Course Co-Directors: Joao Nunes, M.D.,
                                          Darwin Deen, M.D.

The Patient-Doctor Sequences I and II are two consecutive longitudinal clinically oriented academic sequences designed to meet the needs of the fourth-year students. Patient-Doctor Sequences I and II enable the students to acquire, integrate, and properly apply knowledge for, and develop the skills and attitudes to engage in basic cardiac life support, effective patient-centered medical interviewing through the study of all aspects of the doctor-patient relationship, review of systems, and medical decision making within an introduction to primary care practice. The experience is structured to enhance students' familiarity with the multiple facets of primary care medicine. Rotation at partner Community Health Centers under the supervision of community-based primary care physicians will encourage students to hone their diagnostic skills become familiar with community-based medical practices, and develop role-model relationships with primary care physicians. Patient-Doctor Sequences I and II rely on the following didactic components: interactive lectures, small group learning formats, videotape-based sessions, role-playing tutorials, standardized patient tutorials, and medical interviewing practice seminars. Summative and formative evaluation will consist of written clinical essays, and Group Objective Structured Clinical Examinations

• MED 53900
  Clinical Decision Making and Evidence-Based Medicine
  Fall, 5th Year/2 credits
  2 lecture and conference hours per week
  Prerequisite: MED 33501
  Duration: 15 weeks
  Course Director: Erica I. Lubetkin, M.D. , M.P.H.

This course focuses on applications of the scientific method to evaluations of medical practice. Through lectures and problem-solving workshops, the course reviews the methods of evidence-based assessment of the medical literature. Using examples taken from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, students gain understanding of core concepts such as probability, sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic testing, measurement of risk, pre-and post-test likelihoods, decision analysis and cost effectiveness analysis. These concepts are built upon in small group settings in the context of decision making within clinical practice.