MedBiquitous Program Updates - August 13

Dr. Angela D. Blood thinks of herself as a solid generalist in health professions education. As the Director II of Curriculum Research and Advancement at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), she leads a cross-functional team that supports schools and educators in their curriculum work. Dr. Blood’s work includes support of members and institutions in the creation of communal resources and networking opportunities, strategic use of data and communications for advocacy and dissemination, rigorous application of best practices in data science and educational research, change management leadership to ensure nimble operations and responsible resource allocation, sustainable and equitably accessible processes and opportunities, community building and engagement, and collaboration. Dr. Blood holds a PhD in education with focuses on health professions education and curriculum and instruction from The University of Illinois Chicago. With over 15 years of leadership experience, Dr. Blood has a passion for advancing medical education and health care. Prior to her work at the association, Dr. Blood’s practical experience with healthcare systems, clinical environments, and learning science, along with clinical experience as an emergency medical technician and program development as a United State Peace Corps volunteer has been fruitful for her work with universities, hospitals, and national associations. Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelablood/  

Jeff Downing is the Senior Director of Product at ScholarRx, where he has led product development efforts for over 6 years. With more than two decades of experience in educational technology, Jeff has been focused on innovation in health professions education and digital learning. During his career, his teams have helped produce a wide range of tools, from adaptive learning programs and virtual simulation platforms to curriculum exchanges and open authoring tools. In his role at ScholarRx, Jeff provides strategic direction for product development, working to build curricular and assessment solutions that enhance medical education. Jeff currently serves on the MedBiquitous Steering Committee, contributing to the advancement of technology standards for healthcare education, competence assessment, and quality improvement.

Dr. Tao Le is an internationally recognized expert in digital learning, medical licensing exam preparation, and student engagement in medical education. Dr. Le earned his medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco, trained in internal medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital and completed an allergy and immunology fellowship and a master’s in health sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Le has authored over 40 textbooks including the First Aid for the Boards series. He is currently chief of adult allergy and immunology at the University of Louisville and Chief Education Officer of ScholarRx, a global platform for shared medical curriculum.

Terence P. Ma is Assistant Dean for Assessment and Quality Improvement and Clinical Professor of Biomedical Sciences at the Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine. In this role, he is responsible for developing, maintaining, and managing plans for continuous quality improvement for medical student education, monitors, maintains, and manages accreditation, provides oversight and guidance to faculty and staff working with medical student academic performance assessment, curriculum evaluation, and program evaluation. His scholarly activities focus on the issue of how “we” know that students “learned” what we taught. He has focused on learner outcomes tracking and program outcomes analysis. In particular, he works on competency-based medical education (CBME) and its application to preclerkship education. He worked on the IEEE recommended practices on defining competencies and the IEEE technical standards on defining competencies. He chairs the Open Competency Network, an international working group, which focuses on the organizational and technical infrastructure to improve the use of competencies to power the talent ecosystem at scale. For MedBiquitous, he was the co-chair of the Health Professions Education Curriculum Exchange Working Group. He has been a funded research scientist, faculty member, course director, department chair, assistant dean, associate dean, and chief information officer. He worked at multiple allopathic (MD) and osteopathic (DO) schools around the country, including four new medical schools.

Amy Opalek is the Sr. Director for World Resources at the Foundation for Advancement of Medical Education and Research (FAIMER). In this role she directs the development of information resources describing international health professions education, regulation, certification, and migration. This includes the World Directory of Medical Schools, a freely searchable database providing details of medical education programs in over 180 countries, developed in partnership with the World Federation for Medical Education. Dr. Opalek holds a PhD in Information Science from Drexel University. Her research interests include metadata, business analysis, data modeling, and international standards development.

Lynn Shaull is a researcher and program leader in the Scholarly Engagement Unit of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). She is passionate about creating more and new spaces for emerging voices in health professions education research. Prior to joining the AAMC, Lynn worked for 10 years in support of state public health, directing chronic disease prevention and treatment programs. She received her MA in medical anthropology from Georgia State University and MHPE from the Uniformed Services University. She currently lives in the Philadelphia area with her family.