The Harvard Macy Institute has been a dedicated worldwide community of practice for more than 25 years, with more than 6000 alumni from 81 countries.

We work hard to keep our community connected virtually! One of our special initiatives is our annual #HMICommunity Day. This year, we again celebrate with sincere gratitude to our worldwide community of healthcare professionals transforming education and healthcare delivery during challenging and uncertain times.

Please join us TODAY, August 10th for #HMICommunity Day - a virtual celebration of our worldwide community of practice! As alumni and friends, join us in showing support for our organization by tagging us in a photo and/or message on one of our three social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn – and letting us know what the Harvard Macy Institute means to you. Please tag all messages with our hashtag #HMICommunity, and the hashtag of courses you have attended - #HMIEducators, #HMIAssessment, #HMILeaders, or #HMIVirtual.

We look forward to your engagement on #HMICommunity Day, and welcome an even more joyful 2022. Thank you for helping us celebrate our worldwide community!

At the onset of the pandemic in New York City, our medium sized midtown hospital exhausted our meager stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) faster than a forest fires ravages. One reason briskly identified was the failure to cohort COVID-19 patients on a single floor. The other more important cause was that medicine teams in our hospital have patients scattered throughout the hospital in a non geographic model across 4 different floors. Within 2 weeks, administration and hospital medicine leadership developed a geographic model. We started cohorting all COVID-19 positive patients on separate floors from negative patients. A geographic physician team model was also developed, which allowed physicians and nurses to don and doff at the entry and exit of each COVID-19 unit. 

Not all who wander are lost…but many of us are. How often have you wandered through a day unaware of your own physical and emotional presence as you walk from one patient to the next? Take it a step further – how often have you cared for “another (insert common diagnosis) patient” with a checklist of management protocols? How often have you felt on the verge of burnout?

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

Podcast #14 features HMI faculty member Martin Pusic, in a discussion about artificial intelligence (AI), big data, analytics and algorithms – and how they might transform healthcare and health professions education        

Whether through an official faculty development training or informal feedback from a colleague, you have probably been told about the importance of communication in health professions education more times than you can count. Given the current, and likely future, emphasis on online learning, communication with students is more important than ever before. But what exactly is meant by “communication” and, more importantly, how do we use it to positively influence student learning in an online environment? Let’s take a look at the different types of communication needed in online learning and how to make it an asset in your program: