New Leadership
Francesca Duncan, MD, was named Co-Chair of the Equity and Inclusion Committee, and Cynthia Brown, MD, was named Co-Chair of the Women in Medicine and Science (WIMS) Group. In the latter half of the year, the WIMS group welcomed trainees to several events and will continue to host frequent trainee-inclusive events in 2023.

Health Equity Focus
The department implemented a new department-wide focus on health equity. This began with new leaders:

Lauren Nephew, MD, MA, MSCE, was named Associate Vice Chair for Health Equity, and Ashley Gilmore, MD, was named Assistant Vice Chair for Health Equity. In December, Dr. Nephew, Dr. Gilmore, and Dr. Sotto put forth the Department of Medicine Health Equity Strategic Proposal, which commits the department to identifying and understanding the burden of health disparities in six strategic areas, and then beginning to intervene on them. Watch for more on this in 2023.

The department also launched the Health Equity Research Collaborative for those interested in collaborations to help advance this work. The Collaborative’s first meeting was focused on developing proposals for the Primary Care Reaffirmation for Indiana Medical Education (PRIME) grant program, and resulted in four funded projects.

Continued Success of the Leadership Program
2022 marked the second successful year of the Strategic Equity and Inclusion Leadership Program. This year’s cohort included 11 participants from across the
department, the school and the IU Health system.

Expansion of Partnership with Puerto Rican Medical Schools
For the third year, faculty from the Department of Medicine participated in mock interviews for medical students from Ponce Health Sciences University, Universidad Central del Caribe (UCC) and San Juan Bautista School of Medicine. Ponce has participated in these mock interviews since 2020; UCC and San Juan Bautista joined the effort this year. Sixty-two students signed up. Additionally, this year the department partnered with faculty from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York to host the interviews.