Dr. Amanda Birnbaum Participated in NJ Population Health Summit 2017

Teaching a new technique or technology is the norm at New Jersey’s schools of medicine and health, but teaching amid a shift to population health management and how to care for patients under the new dynamic is an interesting challenge.Most schools have handled it by looking for inspiration in developing countries, as well as ensuring active engagement with real-world needs in the state.

The changing field presents itself at a time when the state has seen a growth in health education — with new schools having been built in the past five years, as well as growth in existing schools.

Officials from these schools spoke about the curriculum around population health management at the New Jersey Department of Health’s annual summit at Rider University in Lawrenceville last week.

The panel, lead by DOH Commissioner Cathleen Bennett, focused on the various programs and needs for new student training in the state.

Amanda Birnbaum, chair of the department of public health at Montclair State University encourages students to focus on the deeper roots of problems, and understanding behavioral economics is key to population health.

“We need to be thinking more about what is causing these problems, and how do we go upstream to try to fix them and prevent the problems from happening in the first place,” she said. “Thinking broadly about who we work with and who our audiences are.”

Birnbaum said the schools has also seen an uptick in Fulbright Scholars who want to study health, and in turn, the school learns from these international students about population health.

The school has graduated students from Afghanistan, South Africa, Indonesia and Mozambique, according to Birnbaum.

Bonita Stanton, dean of the yet-to-open Seton Hall-Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, said she brings some understanding of population health from her time working in Bangladesh.

She was approached by some of the individuals and asked why she was treating rather than educating and providing prevention practices.

With input from the group of largely uneducated women, Stanton was able to work with the informal community structure and put together a study of the local population and figure out what was the root cause and how to change the unintentionally harmful practices of the community.

Dona Schneider, associate dean at Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, said the school helps train students by not only focusing on the cross section of public health and medicine, but also on the active environment of changes in communities and policy. Community leaders and politicians are invited to speak to students to give them a real-time update about the issues they will soon face.

Karen Magee-Sauer, dean of the college of Science and Mathematics at Rowan University, said the data analytics students are a hot commodity, to the point where Cooper University Health tried to hire seniors before they had graduated.

That led to a projects class that helped the hospital in Camden analyze its raw data.

One benefit already seen from the collaboration is figuring out why a certain population was staying longer after a procedure than others, and creating a scheduling fix to avoid that costly problem.

“Just from that project, they’re going to save millions of dollars,” Magee-Sauer said.

Michael Avaltroni, dean of the school of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Farleigh Dickinson University, said this includes giving students a chance to be get on the streets and interact with communities.

“Part of the course is teaching them about the diseases but much more of the course is bringing them into the community to understand the patient population. And the stories we hear from students about how they have changed their view of how they see these patients…we want them to understand that these are people just like them,” Avaltroni said. “A series of unfortunate events or a series of circumstances put them in a positon whereby they are on a very different path.”

The students don’t actively give medical advice or engage in any sort of practice, but what they do is listen, Avaltroni said.

The goal is to transform the role of a pharmacist from simply handing out medication, to being in charge of managing chronic diseases, he said.