Title:On the right track

When students enroll at Georgetown School of Medicine, they have the opportunity to augment their coursework by participating in a four-year longitudinal academic track that explores subjects ranging from population health to spirituality in medicine.

Among the most popular, with more than 130 participants, is the Healthcare Leadership Track (HLT). Directed by former dean for medical education Stephen Ray Mitchell, HLT enables students to gain a broader view of real-world medicine, with the goal of equipping them to be agents of change as physicians. There are three concentrations: health care innovation, health care strategy, and patient quality and safety improvement.

In the health care innovation concentration, small groups of students develop either a product or service that represents an innovation in health care. “They create a complete economic model of how it would work, and then they enter a pitch competition run by the business school,” says HLT student leader Griffith Gosnell (M’26).

As student leader, Gosnell has been instrumental in arranging speaker engagements for the health care strategy concentration. “Our goal is to connect students with leaders in different executive positions—the CEO of OrthoVirginia, people from Capitol Hill,” he says.

“We recently had a fascinating discussion with a private practice plastic surgery owner. He drafted out all the factors I’ve never thought about as a medical student, like showing how practice in an academic center breaks down in terms of cases per hour and the benefits of partnering with a surgery center if you’re in private practice.”

As a capstone project, Gosnell explains, all students in the concentration are required to initiate contact with a health care leader in a job that they would want one day. “The primary objective is to ask them, ‘How did you get into this? Is it something you love? What is your life like day-to-day?’” From this initial contact, students can potentially gain long-term contacts and valuable career mentorship opportunities.

“The beauty of the capstone is that you can go in any direction,” says Gosnell’s fellow student leader Madeline Karsten (M’25). For her own capstone in patient safety and quality improvement, Karsten is expanding on an earlier research project examining how the pandemic and the rise of telehealth has impacted people living with HIV in the local area. “I’m focusing on systems, analyzing how virtual medicine is both helpful and a hindrance to care.”

Karsten credits the concentration’s faculty advisor—Carole Hemmelgarn, program director of the Executive Master’s in Clinical Quality, Safety & Leadership at the School of Health and senior director of education for the MedStar Institute for Quality & Safety—for enabling her to gain a systemwide perspective.

“She lost a child due to medical error, and she’s committed her life to advocating for improved policies,” Karsten says. “It really struck a chord for me, helping to contextualize the importance of having effective workflows and policies in place to keep patients safe.

“Thinking about hospital systems and health systems through that lens will certainly stay with me for the rest of my career.”