Division News

Clarissa Jonas Diamantidis, MD, MHS, assistant professor of medicine (General Internal Medicine and Nephrology), started her residency at Duke focused on cardiology.

“My father was a Black-Hispanic cardiologist with an interest in health disparities and access to care,” she says, “and I was intent on following in his footsteps.”

However, during nephrology rounds she became fascinated with kidney disease. Her first visit to a dialysis unit sealed the deal: “It was full of black patients hooked up to ominous-looking machines, with a striking deficiency of white patients. At that moment, I decided I wanted to study nephrology.”

Three times for this one. Saumil Chudgar, MD, Duke hospitalist and director of undergraduate medical education for the Department of Medicine, just received recognition from the medical students, again from the second years in the Practice Course, recognizing those who demonstrate exceptional professional behavior in the clinical setting.

Jeffrey Clough, MD, a Health Services Researcher at Duke, is the lead author of this recent JAMA viewpoint article, July 28, 2015.

Jeffrey D. Clough, MD, MBA, Barak D. Richman, JD, PhD, Seth W. Glickman, MD, MBA. Outlook for Alternative Payment Models in Fee-for-Service Medicare. JAMA. 2015;314(4):341-342. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.8047.

Join your fellow GIM colleagues for our first Wine & Cheese Social plus Posters!

Event Information

Date: Thursday, September 24, 2015

Time: 5:00 - 7:00 pm

Location: the Great Hall in the Trent Semans Building

Annually the Department of Medicine names an individual from each division to receive an award for excellence in education. Accompanying this recognition is a $5000 gift! This year's beneficiary in GIM is Dr. Sharon Rubin, a clinician-educator and Assistant Professor of Medicine.

Hayden Bosworth, PhD, recently traveled to Singapore, where he led five workshops on implementation and dissemination in Duke-NUS graduate medical school. Bosworth’s workshops, which were held from July 13 to 16, attracted more than 150 participants from local universities and hospitals, government health-care agencies,  and other institutions. The workshops provided an overview of conceptual frameworks, program evaluation, appropriate methods and programs designs, primary and secondary outcome measures, and disseminating results.

For this week’s faculty spotlight, we talk to David Edelman, MD, (pictured with his three children Adam, Isaac, and Sara, during a recent trip to the Alhambra in southern Spain), a 21-year veteran of the division of General Internal Medicine. In this interview, Edelman talks about health systems interventions to improve chronic diseases, why successful interventions for veterans and other specific populations don’t always translate to the general public, and his efforts to expand his cooking repertoire.

Nrupen Bhavsar, PhD, is the subject of this week’s faculty spotlight. In this interview, Bhavsar talks about understanding and improving chronic disease at the population level, his work in the QDACT team, and a recent Cancer article that examined how a major clinical trial actually affected treatment for elderly women with breast cancer.

Palliative care physician R. Morgan Bain, MD, FAAHPM is the subject of this week’s faculty spotlight. Bain talks to us about directing the Duke Outpatient Palliative Care Program, meeting the emotional needs of patients new to palliative care, and how his interests in palliative care, geriatrics, and internal medicine inform each other.

For this week’s faculty spotlight, we talk to hospitalist Onyinye (Onyi) Iweala, MD (left in photo), who looks forward to every new problem or patient complaint as an intellectual puzzle to be solved. In this interview, Iweala talks to us about the intellectual and emotional pleasures of working in internal medicine, following in the footsteps of a famous mother, and how she stays in shape while working full-time and raising two children.