Honors and Awards

GIM Faculty Receive 2011 Teaching Awards
Three GIM faculty received awards at the 6th Annual Excellence in Education Award Ceremony on October 12, 2011.

Population-Based Research Optimizing Screening through Personalized Regimens (PROSPR) consortium to include UT Southwestern and Parkland
Drs. Celette Skinner and Ethan Halm received a 5 year, $6.3 million NCI colorectal cancer screening center grant to be part of a new national PROSPR consortium. The Parkland-UT Southwestern PROSPR Center represents a multidisciplinary collaboration between the Parkland Hospital and Health System, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Simmons Cancer Center, and UT School of Public Health. GIM faculty involved in this research endeavor include: Ethan Halm, MD, MPH, Ruben Amarasingham, MD, MBA, and Noel Santini, MD. The goal of the PROSPR Center is to optimize CRC screening through personalized regimens in our integrated safety-net health system serving a large and diverse population of under- and uninsured patients in Dallas.

Dr. Amit Shah Leads Education Modules Project for Teaching Geriatrics Basic Competencies
Amit Shah, MD, will lead a new POGOe project that is underway, collaborating with several physicians, including members of the University of Alabama's Reynolds Foundation team. The POGOe Geriatric Education Modules (Web-GEMs) will be a series of online clinical cases designed for teaching MS3/MS4 students basic competencies in geriatrics. Envisioned as a virtual curriculum, these clinical cases are to be based on each of the AAMC Geriatrics Competencies and other important geriatrics syndromes and will be designed for easy integration into core clinical clerkships with emphasis on "core topics".

GIM Outpatient Clinics Receive PCMH Level 3 Recognition from NCQA
UT Southwestern’s General Internal Medicine outpatient practice—including the Geriatrics Clinic—received Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) recognition at Level 3, the highest level, from the National Committee on Quality Assurance. A Patient-Centered Medical Home is “a health care setting that facilitates partnerships between individual patients, and their personal physicians, and when appropriate, the patient’s family,” providing care “when and where [patients] need and want it in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner.”

The designation is the culmination of 12 months of effort by the PCMH Initiative team. Team members are Lynne Kirk, MD; Temple Howell-Stampley, MD; Kim Batchelor, MPH; Deepa Bhat, Katherine Coffey, and Ewa Henderson, RN.

Four UTSW Students Accepted by MSTAR Program
Four UT Southwestern medical students have been accepted by the American Federation of Aging's Medical Student Training in Aging Research (MSTAR) Program. MSTAR will fund summer work for UTSW students Michael Wu and Anisha Turner, both of whom will remain at UTSW and be mentored by Dr. Craig Rubin and Dr. Kathryn Eubank. UT students Salmon Hirani and Nancy Lin will be at the MSTAR centers at John Hopkins University and University of California San Francisco, respectively.  

GIM Faculty Receive 2010 Teaching Awards
Four GIM faculty received awards at the 5th Annual Excellence in Education Award Ceremony on October 25, 2010.

GIM Hospitalist Dr. Imran Khawaja honored with the 2010 “Golden Pager” Award
This award is given by the University Hospitals nursing staff to the “one physician who demonstrates empathy for patients, collaboration with nurses, and an overall dedication to the medical profession.” Also nominated were GIM hospitalists Drs. Emilia Thomas, Ali Zamanian, Bielose Konwe, Ketul Patel and Amit Kothari.

Ruben Amarasingham, MD, receives a $980,000 one-year grant
Dr. Amarasingham, director of Parkland’s Center for Clinical Innovation and assistant professor of internal medicine, received the grant from the W.W. Caruth, Jr. Foundation via the Communities Foundation of Texas to fund a one-year study of the potential impact and feasibility of an information-based network connecting medical providers and social service agencies for the benefit of the most at-risk members of Dallas County.

Roopali Gupta, MD, awarded a prestigious HRSA Geriatric Academic Career Award
Dr. Gupta is a geriatrician clinician educator. Her grant, “Teaching interprofessional learners an individualized approach for geriatric preventive medicine,” is a 5-year award which proposes development and implementation of novel interprofessional curriculum addressing the complexities of providing preventive medicine to older adults.

Ramona Rhodes, MD, MPH, receives a 2010 Merck/American Geriatrics Society New Investigator Award
Dr. Rhodes is a geriatrician clinician researcher with a focus on racial disparities in hospice use and end-of-life care. The New Investigator Awards are awarded to individuals whose original research, as presented in a submitted abstract, reflects new and relevant research in geriatrics, and are designed to recognize individuals who are committed to a career in aging research.

Watson Clinical Excellence Prize goes to Gary Reed, MD
Gary Reed, MD, was selected as the first recipient of the Watson Prize for Excellence in Clinical Medicine. This award will be given annually to honor a member of the UT Southwestern faculty for excellence in contributions as a clinician and/or clinical innovator. The award is supported by an endowment gift from Dr. Bill Watson, a graduate of UT Southwestern, and his wife Patricia. They have requested that it be used "to recognize a physician who has a profound impact on patients and their families through hands-on clinical care."

Dallas Business Journal (DBJ) Honors Halm and Amarsingham as Health Care Heroes
Ethan Halm, MD, received the DBJ Newcomer Award. The DBJ article cited Dr. Halm's commitment to "delivering high-quality, evidenced-based, patient-centered care" as well as his focus on "robust clinical outcomes and health research programs."

Ruben Amarsingham, MD, was awarded the DBJ Academic Researcher Award. The DBJ article cites his studies of social indicators as a way to predict and prevent future medical problems, and how hospitals with better IT systems (eg. electronic medical records) have better patient outcomes. Dr. Amarsingham's efforts are widely recognized and are being used in the development of public health policy and legislation.