Augusta University | Healthcare Workforce: A Prescription for the Future

Augusta University and MCG are key players in developing innovative treatments and delivery methods and, perhaps most importantly, training compassionate professionals while seeking unique ways to improve instruction and learning for the next generation of students. The AU-MCG Savannah campus represents the implementation of a strategy years in the making.

“Part of the excitement around the state about this [medical school] is that we’re celebrating a model of a public-private partnership,” says Paul Hinchey, president and CEO of St. Joseph’s-Candler Hospital System, MCG’s health system partner in Savannah.

St. Joseph’s physicians train medical students for free, exposing them to every required specialty rotation, including community healthcare clinics and participation in the hospital’s institutional review board (IRB), which oversees clinical trials.

“We’ve got Tier-1 academic institutions, three of them – AU, MCG and Georgia Southern – and you have a locally owned and locally governed health system,” Hinchey says. “This model has scalability to other areas of Georgia and other states in the country as we try to address medical education. The common vision is to work together to expand health access. The second part of that vision is to educate in Georgia and then [for students to] work in Georgia.”

Responding to Rural Needs

Educating and training the healthcare workforce in Georgia is a crucial part of the AU mission. Between 2011 to 2020, 57% of medical school residents remained in the state where they completed their residency, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. Nearly 50% of all MCG graduates remain in Georgia to practice.

Next Generation: Dr. David Hess (back row, center), executive vice president for Medical Affairs and Integration, interim vice president of Research and Innovation and dean of MCG, with students and researchers working to find better treatments for stroke and vascular dementia. Photo: Hillary Rumsey

It’s estimated that by 2030, Georgia will be short 8,012 doctors. More than 2.75 million Georgians live in counties designated as health professional shortage areas (where there are 3,500 or more patients for every one provider). These bleak statistics drove the work behind curriculum changes like the MCG 3+ program, allowing students to finish medical school in three years instead of four, enhancing instructional partnerships and leveraging technology to give medical students at regional medical colleges opportunities to partner with researchers and specialists elsewhere.

“We’re also working with the University System of Georgia and the legislature to increase the number of residency slots in Georgia,” says Dr. David Hess, executive vice president for Medical Affairs and Integration, interim vice president of Research and Innovation, and dean of MCG. “We lag other states in the number of residency slots. If all we do is produce medical students and there aren’t residency slots they want to go to, they’re going to leave the state.”

Trailblazing Experience: Dr. Joseph Hobbs, who was the longtime chair of the Department of Family Medicine at MCG and instrumental in establishing partnerships with Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC). Photo: Contributed

In addition to his academic work, Hess is also a renowned neurologist and health entrepreneur. Along with his team, Hess helped develop the REACH Telestroke network, which was first used in rural Georgia in 2003. He champions creating learning opportunities for medical students outside the academic healthcare system by partnering with providers like Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC), which serve as mini health systems often located in rural areas. The experience can be eye-opening for students regarding available resources, scope of services and access.

Oconee Valley Healthcare FQHC serves almost 20,000 patients in a service area covering Lake Oconee, Eatonton, Greensboro and Milledgeville. Medical students, typically during their third year, do a four-to-six-week rotation with the FQHC, during which they shadow a doctor and see up to 20 patients a day.

“We take the students to the hospital and make rounds,” says Dr. David Ringer, CEO of Oconee Valley Healthcare. “They make nursing home visits, too, a rarity for most medical students.”

Oconee Valley is staffed with several MCG physicians who moved to rural Georgia because they were exposed to the work and lifestyle during their medical school training. The partnerships between the Medical College and the Federally Qualified Health Centers began decades ago under the leadership of Dr. Joseph Hobbs, a trailblazer at MCG as a student, a longtime member of the Department of Family Medicine and as the department’s first Black chair. Hobbs shares Hess’s concern about resident education.

“If we’re going to prepare the next generation to be in service to Georgia, it’s important that students have a good understanding of the entirety of the healthcare delivery system,” Hobbs says. “From what might happen in small-town Georgia with regards to access to services, all the way to someone who has a disease of such severity or specificity that they need the expertise that might be inside of an academic health center or other larger healthcare systems within our state.”

“Our mission is to contribute to higher education, research outcomes, and clinical practice and translate that into transforming lives through education and saving lives through phenomenal research and bench-to-bedside clinical activity.”

Russell Keen, president, Augusta University

With Hess’s mandate, Hobbs’ experience and lots of hard work, MCG formed educational partnerships with other FQHCs like Oconee Valley Healthcare, created affiliations with more than 350 clinics statewide, and established regional two-year health campuses in Albany (Southwest campus), Rome and Dalton (Northwest) and Savannah and Brunswick (Southeast) that provide quality health service and exceptional training opportunities for MCG medical students. And this year, a fourth regional campus opened in Metro Atlanta at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital. In addition to the two-year campuses, Savannah opened a four-year campus last summer in partnership with Georgia Southern.

“We say Georgia is our campus and, literally, it’s true,” Hess says.

Innovation in Telemedicine

Augusta University is also at the forefront of training in telehealth.

“Every single student that comes through the Augusta campus is trained in telehealth before they even begin their clerkship,” says Dr. Matt Lyon, director of the MCG Center for Digital Health. “They start seeing patients on telemedicine almost the day they start medical school. They don’t know much [about] medicine, but they start learning how to talk to a patient on telemedicine at the same time they’re learning how to do it in a clinical setting.”

Teaching New Skills: Dr. Matt Lyon, director of the MCG Center for Digital Health. Photo: Contributed

Telehealth classes occur three days a week with real patients. The all-in teaching approach helps students adapt quickly, builds their confidence and ultimately provides better healthcare for patients. Students can apply those telehealth skills as they train with practitioners and patients enrolled in the Virtual Care at Home program, a program started during the pandemic that allowed for virtual nursing in the home.

The program is partly funded with $1 million in federal dollars and is meant to help qualified patients avoid a hospital readmission after discharge. With a laptop or tablet and remote health monitoring equipment, healthcare professionals observe someone while they recuperate at home. Lyon says students get training in observation skills in a home setting using telehealth tools and developing communication skills acquired in their telehealth classes.

“They aren’t telehealth naïve when they get out of medical school,” he says. “They know what telehealth can do. We’re creating the telehealth workforce of the future.”

None of the training would be possible without an academic healthcare partner offering collaborative space, whether physical laboratories, hospital rooms or digital platforms. In August 2023, Wellstar and Augusta University entered into an agreement that created Wellstar MCG Health.

“We take the academic mindset, vision and resources of the MCG and execute it on the clinical side to benefit the patients across Georgia,” says Ralph Turner, president of MCG Health Medical Center.

Academics to Clinics: Ralph Turner, president of MCG Health Medical Center. Photo: Contributed

Thanks to investments from Wellstar MCG Health, the MCG Center for Telehealth has expanded and flourished through programs like Virtual Health at Home and TeleOB, a new program providing emergency fetal monitoring services. In November, the healthcare system implemented the EPIC electronic medical records system, the most widely used electronic records system in the U.S., training the next generation of medical professionals on a digital platform from day one.

Rethinking How Students Learn

Many AU undergraduates major in biology, hoping to attend medical school, and while that’s a good path, it’s not always that simple. Students have to pass fundamental biology classes, which typically require extensive reading and memorization from a massive textbook, to earn a Bachelor of Science in biology and then make a strong application to medical school. Finding ways to help students succeed, especially undergraduates, was one of the reasons for a recent overhaul of the two-part introductory biology course sequence.

“It’s that ‘beat out’ class you hear about,” says Amy Abdulovic-Cui, interim chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Augusta University. “But it doesn’t have to be.”

Over the past two years, under Abdulovic-Cui’s leadership, AU reevaluated the course content and the way it was presented. The department swapped the heavy, expensive textbook for digital learning platforms to engage students in the material, testing and retesting them on it, and streamlined lectures so that no matter when a student takes a class or who the professor is, they all get identical material. The focus is on critical thinking skills, not memorization.

“[Students] don’t need to memorize something they can look up,” says Abdulovic-Cui. “They need to be able to assess a problem and come up with a solution because that’s what they want to do for their career.”

Initial results are promising from the first class to go through the revised curriculum – 10% to 15% improvement in overall grades compared to previous years – and the instructors expect to see even better results as they tweak the
program.

“We’re trying to meet the students where they are, still make them do the work and learn, but not overwhelm them, so they can be successful,” she says.

Increasing Research and Impact

Lab Work: Jennifer Sullivan, interim executive vice president for Academic Affairs and provost at Augusta University. Photo: Contributed

The Biomedical Sciences Ph.D. program at Augusta University is thriving, with an 80% increase in enrollment from fall 2023 to fall 2024 – thanks to a strategic refocus on recruitment efforts, which included a new recruitment coordinator and a $1 million investment. That enabled the program to nearly double to 46 students supported on graduate research assistantships. With the intentional growth in the biomedical sciences doctoral program, MCG aims to develop researchers in neuroscience, cancer biology, immunology, pharmacology and physiology.

“These Ph.D. students are among the primary workforce for our laboratories,” says Jennifer Sullivan, interim executive vice president for Academic Affairs and provost at Augusta University. Sullivan also serves as dean of the graduate school and is a professor of physiology. “Not only do students contribute to the research, but they also help grow the institution’s reputation as they go to national conferences and present their work, publish their work and get fellowships. It enriches and enhances the entire research community within the Medical College of Georgia by having such a robust increase in our class size.”

Welcome Collaborators: Guido Verbeck, chair of AU’s Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, in his mass spectrometry lab. Photo: Contributed

Graduate research assistants are vital to lab work, including in the Specialized Center of Research Excellence in Sex Differences (SCORE), which was funded by a $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Sullivan and her graduate assistants are studying the differing risk factors that make women more susceptible to developing heart disease. In the Laboratory of Imaging Mass Spectrometry, Guido Verbeck relies on grants from supporters like the Gates Foundation to fund graduate assistants and undergraduate students assisting in his work in developing a breathalyzer-like tool being tested in the field to detect life-threatening diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. These student researchers are welcome collaborators in Verbeck’s lab.

“Right now, there are three undergrads, one graduate student and one post-doc working in that space,” Verbeck says. “All my students publish with me; even my undergrads do. If they spend more than two semesters in my lab, they typically get on a paper, present [study results] or put out an honors thesis or something to that effect. It’s nice with the Gates Foundation because they champion that.”

The Georgia Cancer Center is also part of Augusta University. The center provides patient care in its cancer clinic, operates a research center and laboratories conducting groundbreaking research and clinical trials, and offers community outreach.

Common Goal: Dr. Jorge Cortes, director of the Georgia Cancer Center at AU. Photo: Contributed

“We also do a lot of education for trainees [students] who will be treating patients and for those who will be doing research in the laboratory or some other type of research,” says Dr. Jorge Cortes, director of the Georgia Cancer Center. “That is what a cancer center is, an entity that encompasses all of these [roles]; these are not just different parts of it. They are integrated into a common goal that tightly fits into each other. Our mission statement is that we would decrease the burden of cancer in Georgia and beyond through innovation, outstanding patient care and education.”

The construction of a 150,000-square-foot, $146 million research facility aligns with Augusta University’s strategic vision to achieve top-tier status as a research university and a top 60 NIH ranking by 2030. The school is raising $30 million in private support and plans to seek state funding.

“I’ve told people this is the beginning of our quest for more research and innovation here,” says Keen. “We feel this ecosystem of research and innovation will be key. We are a student-centered research university, and we are the right-sized university where students can enjoy that because they can be engaged, respected and not just a number.”