Internal medicine goes external: how a TCOM Department is creating new community
We have all heard the proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child,” but what about a medical student?
“It literally takes a whole city to train a medical student,” said Asim Kicholoo,
MD, Diplomat ABOM, CPPS, chair and professor of the Department of Medicine and subspecialties
at UNT Health at Fort Worth’s Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Since the start of the year, Kichloo has spearheaded a new initiative that has seen
his department go directly to primary care providers across Tarrant County in a community
outreach project to build trust and expand relationships.
“For the last eight months, the whole purpose of this is a physician-facing project
to tell them about who we are, what our educational mission is at TCOM, our clinical
mission at UNT Health, and what we do,” Kichloo said. “We have gone to multiple primary
care clinics that are not affiliated with any systems and visited with them.”
Kichloo and the various faculty and staff members, who include Jessica Arroyo, Sarah
Ross, DO, Michael Carletti, DO, April Wiechmann, PhD, and Lizbeth Rodrigez, when visiting
these locations, have showcased the collaborative opportunities with TCOM and the
UNT Health Clinical Practice Group.
“We walk to these practices about what we offer as a sub-specialties clinic and also
what it means to be an adjunct faculty member with TCOM.”
The specialty services include dermatology, GI, neurology, cardiology, geriatric care and neuropsychology, which will give the providers and their patients opportunities for the best treatment. At the latest meet and greet, the team met with internal medicine residents and faculty from Texas Health Resources in Fort Worth. Among the people in attendance, many were graduates from TCOM, which is a priority for Kichloo and his team to find more alumni to bring under the UNT Health umbrella.
“We give them the information they need to refer patients, but it’s helping in multiple
ways,” Kichloo said. “We are serving the patients in the community so we can alleviate
any suffering they are having, but we are also able to recruit these physicians to
benefit our students as faculty members.
The results have already become tangible with a number of clinical members becoming
adjunct faculty while at the same time taking TCOM students on rotation at their facilities.
“This is face-to-face interactions, and it’s very important because that is how you
build trust with your partners,” Kichloo said. It’s literally being out there and
making sure we are there from a provider physician standpoint. We as human beings
connect with other human beings to say who we are.”
The project isn’t just for a calendar year; it’s long-term. Kichloo and his team will
be collecting data over the next few years to see how their efforts are working and
what impact they are making in the community. He’s also not limited the outreach effort
to just internal medicine and geriatrics, as evidenced by one of the new adjunct faculty
members, who is a family physician and has started taking our medical students.
“This is just a pure, organic collaboration that’s for the good of the community,”
he said. “The faculty members who have gone out on these meetings have been simply
amazing. It’s about building trust, and we are doing that.”