5 min read June 2023 —In an interview with Invest:, Charles Cairns, MD, the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Dean of the College of Medicine and senior vice president for medical affairs at Drexel University, discusses the institution’s remarkable growth, innovative approaches to medical education and commitment to addressing health disparities. With the expansion of clinical campuses, a focus on interprofessional education, and efforts to promote diversity, Cairns envisions a bright future for Drexel and the Greater Philadelphia area in the realms of higher education and healthcare.
What milestones and achievements has Drexel University College of Medicine attained in the past year?
It’s been an extraordinary year for us. We have expanded our clinical regional campuses across Pennsylvania, the Bay Area of California and North Carolina. Our new four-year campus in Reading has now integrated its first cohort of third-year medical students into clinical rotations. The biggest news is that we’re moving into the brand new Drexel Health Sciences building in University City, allowing us to fully integrate interprofessional education with our College of Nursing and Health Professions and cross-disciplinary programs with other colleges of Drexel University. Being in University City will allow us to interact with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the biotech industry in Philadelphia. Our commitment to community integration of healthcare, education, training and research is ever growing.
How would you describe the strength of Greater Philadelphia’s education and healthcare sectors?
We have partnered with impactful healthcare systems within the Philadelphia community and are now the home of the largest private allopathic (M.D. degree granting) medical school in the United States. The Drexel Health Sciences building in University City serves as the centralized hub for all our clinical campuses, including St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, Crozer Health in Chester, Wellspan in York, UPMC in Harrisburg, Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh, as well as with Kaiser Permanente in the San Francisco Bay area and Cape Fear Valley Health System in North Carolina. This nationally distributed medical ecosystem is available to our students, researchers and patients, while being centered in Philadelphia. We can take direct advantage of interactions with our Drexel University colleagues in nursing, health professions, engineering, public health, informatics and information sciences, business, law, arts and sciences. Thus, the Greater Philadelphia education and health sector has enabled us to have a national presence and impact.
How have recent changes in the education sector permanently impacted the way students learn at Drexel University?
When it comes to medical education, the connection to updated medical information and the needs of populations served by healthcare systems is crucial. With this in mind, we have changed our approach to educating and training medical students. In a flipped classroom concept, we first distribute materials online, allowing students to learn at their own pace and on their own schedule. Our face-to-face educational interactions now take place in smaller groups, enabling more in-depth discussions and peer-to-peer learning. This approach aligns with the future medical practice, in which small care teams must effectively apply a vast amount of medical knowledge to the care of individual patients.
We believe this approach is part of a larger movement in the informatics age and consistent with the medical practice of the future. In 1950, the doubling of medical knowledge was estimated to take 50 years; by 1980, it was down to seven years; and in 2010, it was three and a half years. Now, with medical knowledge doubling every 73 days, we must rapidly connect with information sources and deliver that latest information to patients in teams. We have been implementing this approach for the last four years and believe it aligns with our goals moving forward. The next big challenge is how to optimize the utilization of artificial intelligence and machine learning into this approach.
How does Drexel University address health disparities and promote diversity in medical education?
We learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that some populations are disproportionately burdened with higher infection rates, hospitalization rates and death rates. As medical professionals, we must fundamentally understand the cause of these health disparities and how science can be applied effectively, including taking into account differences by gender, age, race and developmental circumstances. We recognize that even within Philadelphia, different micro-environments can dramatically impact the social determinants of health. We actively recruit students from underrepresented areas in medicine to better understand these factors and make our medical education more equitable and effective in diverse communities.
Diversity in medical education is a clinical and scientific imperative, because providers who share the same language and cultures as their patients have better outcomes. Women physicians have better outcomes than male physicians in primary care. We take our commitment to diversity seriously, as we are the successor medical school of Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, the first degree-granting medical school in the world for women. Our women’s leadership program, the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM), has graduated over 1,300 women leaders, including 66% of the women Deans of U.S. medical schools. ELAM has now been expanded to include the Executive Leadership in Healthcare (ELH) program for hospital and systems-based leaders.
How important are access, belief and community partnership in advancing healthcare, and what projects is Drexel University working on to achieve this goal?
We need to emphasize health literacy and work to effectively implement new medical discoveries, technologies (including gene engineering) and care models to eliminate disease and alleviate suffering. Community access, belief, and partnership are essential to make these advances effective. We are developing projects in West Philly to bring this vision to reality and demonstrate that we can make a difference in individuals’ and populations’ lives, especially in underserved areas.
For example, we received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to investigate digital approaches to support underserved populations during the pandemic. As part of these efforts, we developed the first COVID-19 mobile app on Apple and Google Play, integrated the app with a data system for testing and vaccines used by Drexel University and extended it to Philadelphia communities. We established COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children and our Community Wellness Hub at the Dornsife Center in West Philadelphia. We identified significant health inequities. At times during the pandemic, we obtained a COVID testing positivity rate of 44% during times when the city’s reported rate was 7%. We also found neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia with very low vaccination rates and worked with individuals one-on-one to convince people to get vaccinated. This project is informing a national strategy to recognize the importance of better community data collection systems and overall vaccine effectiveness against infection.
What are the major challenges currently faced by medical schools, and how is Drexel University working to address them?
As a medical school, we’re at the intersection of two major challenges. On one hand, there’s the challenge of higher education with changing demographics, rising costs and changing student interests in the value of universities. On the other hand, there’s the challenge of healthcare, which is facing post-COVID macroeconomic forces and staffing challenges, among other pressures. To tackle these challenges, we’ve diversified our exposure to different healthcare systems and designed programs to attract students who will become leaders in diverse fields. We’ve also implemented novel faculty development, recognition, and leadership programs to identify and support new physician leaders and address issues like burnout and career satisfaction among community providers.
In the wake of the pandemic, we’ve seen a lingering sense of moral injury among our healthcare workers, especially nurses and physicians. We want to contribute to a network of support and care to address these challenges of providers. The pandemic also revealed health literacy as a critical issue for our communities and our students can play a vital role in supporting health literacy programs. We’re also working to integrate both undergraduate and interprofessional programs to help students develop their interests in healthcare delivery, research, innovation, and the business and policy of medicine to come up with effective solutions for communities and populations. These are important issues for us, and we’re committed to taking on real-world challenges and living out our mission to make a difference in healthcare.
How do you envision the higher education and healthcare sectors of Drexel University and Greater Philadelphia in the next five years?
As you know, we’ve experienced significant change in the past five years. However, I believe that the future is very bright for us. Despite the challenges we’ve faced, we have proven ourselves to be agile, adaptive, and resilient. In medicine, our students spend four years in medical education and three to five — sometimes 10 years — in residency training, so we need to think along five to 10-year time frames. From that perspective, we are in the midst of a biotechnology revolution, with gene therapy having been invented, perfected, industrialized, and disseminated from Philadelphia. We should work together with other medical institutions in Philadelphia to take collective advantage of this. I am proud that we partnered with Tower Health to turn St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children into a nonprofit and grateful for the support we have received from our colleagues at Temple, Penn, Jefferson, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM) CHOP and Independence Blue Cross. All these institutions are united in serving people in North Philadelphia, who live in some of the poorest urban zip codes in the United States and face significant health disparities.
Furthermore, our network across Pennsylvania, the country, and hopefully around the world, will play a significant role in the informatics age. The doubling of medical knowledge, the dynamic of which has yet to be incorporated into some AI engines, will soon be directly integrated into individualized patient care. We need to consider how this information gets into the hands of patients and broader populations. I believe we are well-positioned to be a world leader in this area, and Drexel can play a critical role in this extraordinary medical innovation ecosystem.
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