Message from Dean Pilitsis
On February 14, 2022, I was fortunate to join the great students, staff and faculty in the Schmidt College of Medicine at FAU. Instantaneously, I felt the sense of community and embraced the humbling responsibility as the only Dean of a Medical School in Palm Beach county to improve the care of the 3.2 million patients in our catchment area. With my additional role as Vice President of Medical Affairs, my plan is to build a synergy among FAU’s colleges that will propel the university toward a new phase of responsive and innovative healthcare delivery in South Florida that can ensure the depth and breadth of the workforce of today and tomorrow.
The creation of the FAU Health Network
The mission of the FAU Health Network is to transcend the competitive landscape through education and research collaborations between the region’s leading public and private academic and medical leaders. The purpose of this network is to maximize interactions between colleges at FAU, including nursing, medicine, engineering, science, education, business, social work and arts and letters to expand our ability to train the needed workforce in an interprofessional environment. These collaborative academic endeavors allow for innovative solutions necessary to tackle the workforce crisis.
Strategic goals have been identified to help realize the vision of the FAU Health Network. To meet these goals, the College of Medicine will increase structured collaboration with colleges, pillars, and institutes at FAU; create a portfolio of assets and faculty expertise at FAU; and, assess and prioritize existing partnerships, create brand recognition and identify existing gaps.
The goals for the FAU Health Network are as follows:
- Increase pre-health pathways from A.D. Henderson through employment as healthcare professionals to provide opportunities for all students interested in healthcare regardless of degree program. Tied to FAU’s ‘Success for all’ emphasis, the basis for revolutionizing healthcare is an education that starts in pre-school and extends through post-graduate training.
- Optimize the interprofessional training of future nurses, allied health professionals, and health technologists/engineers to ensure that learners receive training for ‘jobs of the future,’ i.e., careers at the intersection of technology, medicine, nursing, public health and human biology.
- Establish synergies for bench to bedside research and education. Creating a transformative community care model of personalized inter-disciplinary care outside the walls of traditional healthcare facilities allows healthcare professionals to meet patients where they reside.
- Grow a physician workforce of tomorrow by addressing the number of providers trained. During the next five years, the college will Increase the medical student class size to over 100+ learners (up from 64) and residency/fellowship programs to 300+ learners (up from 177).
- Expand FAU mission-centric education and research faculty who are integral to the mission of FAU Health. The college will pursue new core competencies with the recruitment of clinician scientists, focusing on areas that serve the community while addressing the evolving needs of patient care and new technologies.
- Develop a model for predictive analytics derived care, emphasizing telehealth and mobile/prehospital medicine to develop novel treatments and delivery systems for personalized care, using AI applications to produce positive outcomes.
- Nourish relationships with community partners to build a collaborative network resulting in mutual benefit for FAU’s colleges and the broader community it serves. Regional partners in Palm Beach, Broward and Martin Counties offer an outstanding opportunity for dynamic faculty and learner experiences; provide connectivity to the local healthcare community; and ensure the recruitment and retention of our healthcare professionals.