Ribbon Cutting Officially Opens New Rod Hochman Family Clinical Skills & Simulation Center
The hallways of the new Rod Hochman Family Clinical Skills & Simulation Center were freshly painted, with bright overhead lighting reflecting off polished floors, and new equipment and advanced technology awaiting students in every room. But medical student Madison Ellin, MD’25, was more impressed that the new facility looked like any other hospital or clinic.
This is a real gift, to be able to give the students what they need. To see this happen, is so near and dear to my heart.
Rod Hochman, MD (CAS’79, CAMED’79)
“When you’re going into your third year, to urgent care or outpatient settings, this hallway reflects what it feels like to be in a clinic and you really get that feeling that you can do it,” said Ellin, who is headed to a pediatric residency at Columbia University.
The new skills and simulation center will open this summer. Dean’s Advisory Board (DAB) member Rod Hochman, MD (CAS’79, CAMED’79), and his wife Nancy Hochman (Sargent’77,’83), donated $10 million to build and operate the larger, more technologically advanced center dedicated to preparing MD, physician assistant, mental health and genetic counseling students for the realities of patient diagnosis and care using a team-based approach. Hochman has had a long career serving in senior executive healthcare positions including 18 years as president and chief executive officer of the Providence healthcare system. Nancy Hochman has been a physical therapist for 30 years.
Rod and Nancy Hochman’s daughter Lindsey and their grandson are shown a clinical simulator.
“This is a real gift, to be able to give the students what they need. To see this happen, is so near and dear to my heart,” said Rod Hochman, speaking at the May 8 ribbon cutting. He credited Karen Antman, MD, dean of the medical school and medical campus provost for her vision and persuasiveness.
“When the dean asked me what I thought about a (new) clinical skills and simulation center…I said ‘Okay, you got it,’” said Hochman.
Practicing in an environment like this, that feels like the real thing, gives you that sense of competence and confidence you need. Then, when you go onto the real wards, you feel like you’re just doing it all over again. It’s familiar.
Neil Singh Bedi, MD’26
“I think one of the most important things to us is that we create safety in the transition of students from a classroom to the clinical environment. We do this by providing a space where they can practice and understand the real-world issues that come up when they’re in the clinical environment,” said Associate Dean of Medical Education Priya Garg, MD. The new center was part of the school’s reimagining of how to best train medical students, embodied in the recent curriculum redesign, to integrate learning theory and make learning more active.
“It made natural sense to have more simulation and standardized patient experiences,” said Garg. “Our future patients, when they see our graduates, need to know that our doctors were well-trained in the skills that we value the most, which are developing rapport with our patients, communicating in a way that they feel that they are heard and having the diagnostic and clinical reasoning skills that make them excellent diagnosticians.”
Garg said the school had been talking with Hochman for years about clinical care education, tapping his experience as a CEO. The new center was a natural extension of that conversation, she said.
The old simulation center, located in the basement of the L-building, was crowded, occasionally experienced flooding, had older equipment and an inefficient design. The new center is three times larger, and its rooms are grouped around teaching clinical skills, including the physical examination, hospital care and skills instruction, with 13 clinical skills classrooms, 13 examination rooms for standardized patient (trained actors who grade the students) experiences and four simulated emergency/hospital rooms.
New and upgraded technology includes ultrasound, intercoms and all the equipment found in a standard examination room. A new web-based instructional system allows faculty to observe students remotely with two cameras in each room providing full room coverage.
The four hospital rooms mimic a typical inpatient or emergency room and feature hospital beds, high-fidelity manikins (life-like patient simulators used in medical training), wall screens showing the simulated patient vital signs and x-rays, and handheld ultrasound machines. In an adjacent room behind one-way mirrors, faculty answer questions in the voice of the high-fidelity patient as students interview the manikin while they observe the students so they can facilitate a debrief following the simulation session.
A baby’s cry interrupted Molly Cohen-Osher’s presentation to DAB members on the May 8 tour of the new facility. Cohen-Osher, MD, MMedEd, the assistant dean of medical education for curriculum and instructional design as well as the family medicine director of medical student education, instinctively went to the source of the crying, a realistic manikin of a baby on a hospital bed.
The baby was hooked up to a monitor displaying its vital signs. The manikin could be programmed to display symptoms and to respond to treatment. It could run a fever and sweat and could be intubated, have seizures, have a needle decompression, tracheotomy, chest tubes, take meds and fluids. The baby’s internal electronics analyze student hand placement, compression and air flow during CPR.
Students on hand for the DAB tour praised the design and the technology of the new facility.
Neil Singh Bedi, MD’26, recalled the “deer in the headlights” feeling of seeing his first real patient.
“Practicing in an environment like this, that feels like the real thing, gives you that sense of competence and confidence you need,” said Bedi. “Then, when you go onto the real wards, you feel like you’re just doing it all over again. It’s familiar.”
Speaking at the ribbon cutting, Boston University President Melissa Gilliam, MD, MPH, said the new center reflected both the need to be technologically up to date as well as the importance of giving students the best skills training possible.
“If we do that at this institution, then we can also attract the best students,” said Gilliam, who also thanked the Hochmans for their generosity.
“Your generosity is helping us stay at the forefront of medicine. The students are our future…What we do here, combining an incredible mission with the best possible training will really change the world.”