Columbia Weill Cornell Emergency Medicine Centers of Excellence

We in the NewYork-Presbyterian Emergency Medicine Residency are active outside of the ED nationally, internationally and in our local community.

At the National Level, we have faculty and resident representation on several levels and in different organizations.

Wallace Carter, MD, Residency Director, was recently appointed Vice Chair of the Residency Review Committee for Emergency Medicine. This position enables Dr. Carter to continue charting the course for emergency medicine resident training nationally.
Peter Wyer, MD, Attending Columbia campus, who has been on the Annals of Emergency Medicine editorial board as editor of the Department of Evidence-Based Emergency Medicine since 1997, has been promoted to Associate Editor of the journal. He is currently working under a 2 year grant from the National Board of Medical Examiner's Stemmler Fund for Medical Education Research on a project to design and validate cognitive measures of practice-based learning and improvement (PBLI) for residency education and competency evaluation.
Rahul Sharma, MD, Cornell Faculty has been awarded the EMRA Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. This award is granted to an outstanding attending who has served as a unique role-model for residents.
Osman Sayan, MD, Assistant Residency Program Director, participates on the SAEM Overcrowding Task Force.
Jeremy Sperling, MD, Assistant Residency Program Director, participates on the SAEM, Graduate Medical Education Committee.
Lorna Breen MD, Attending Columbia Campus, was elected to the Board of Directors of the New York Chapter of American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP).
Dr. Jay Lemery, Cornell Attending and the Wilderness Medicine Course Director, was elected Secretary of the Wilderness Medical Society in 2008. Our program has developed strong ties with this national organization, with many faculty members and residents serving on WMS committees and participating in academic projects (research, curriculum development, and policy). Dr. Lemery is busy planning our second Northeast Wilderness CME Conference for the fall of 2009. Visit the website: http://www.nypemergency.org/wilderness/
Ken Yu, MD, MBA, one of our former chief residents and now a faculty member at the Weill-Cornell Emergency Department, has been appointed to SAEM Finance Committee for the second year. This year he is the Chair of Financial Statements and Reporting Subcommittee. He was also recently named a Reviewer for the monthly periodical, Respiratory Medicine.
Anne Hoffmann, Residency Manager, participates on several national committees: CORD PIF, EM Association of Residency Coordinators - Professional Development (EMARC), and EMARC representative to Training Administrators for Graduate Medical Educations (TAGME) certification committee.
Maria Aini, MD, PGY4, one of our Chief Residents and Rishi Goyal, MD, PGY3 have been appointed to the SAEM National Affairs Committee.
Jacqueline J. Mahal, MD, MBA, PGY4 one of our Chief Residents, presented her project A Communication Tool for Emergency Medicine Doctors which was accepted as an Innovation in Education at the National SAEM Conference in Spring 2008.
Christine Zink, MD, PGY3 presented at the National Clinical Pathology Case Conference competition at SAEM in Spring of 2008 and was a runner-up in her group.
Elisabeth Gomes, MD, MPH, PGY4 has been appointed as a representative to the EMRA Public Health and Injury Prevention Committee.
Andrew Amaranto, PGY3 and Peter Steel, PGY2 are the 2008-2009 Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively, of NYS ACEP/EMRA.
Tonya Walker, MD, PGY3 was reappointed as the EMRA representative to the ACEP Public Health Committee.
Ryan Patrick Bayley, MD, PGY1 is presenting his research The Impact of Ambulance Crew Configuration in a one hour lecture at the EMLRC EMS Summit in Clearwater, FL on September 5th, 2008. See the brochure link: http://www.emlrc.org/pdfs/summit2008brochure.pdf

Internationally, our residents and faculty travel to four continents where they are true ambassadors of our department and medical specialty.

India and Sri Lanka: This fall, Dr. Wallace Carter, NYP Residency Director, Dr. Robert Bristow and Dr Satchit Balsari, both NYP-Columbia Attendings will lead a large team of over 12 Attendings and residents to Southeast Asia to run three disaster drills – one in Mumbai and two in Sri Lanka. The multi-disciplinary project offers training and workshops on disaster planning and preparedness. Both a table-top and real-time field drill will put the learning into action. In addition to the drills, monitoring and evaluation tools will be incorporated in order to determine areas of strengths and weaknesses in responsiveness. This data will serve to propel the capacity-building of both local emergency management of mass casualities and coordination of response to disaster. Resident participation is a part of the project with Elisabeth Gomes, MD, PGY4, John Arbo, MD, PGY3 and Rishi Goyal, MD, PGY3 attending and teaching at the disaster drills.
Dominican Republic: In September 2008, Drs. Robert Bristow and Grace Glassman, Columbia EM faculty members, and residents Drs. Doug McLachlan, PGY4 and Sam Gerson, PGY2 will return to the Dominican Republic for the Second Annual Emergency Medicine/Trauma Course in Santiago, Dominican Republic. NYP faculty and residents will teach a four-day course including didactics and skills stations to surgeons, residents and students in the Dominican Republic’s second largest city.

Dr. Bristow has also received a grant from the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research to develop an Emergency Department-based Surveillance System for Road Traffic Injuries. The purpose of the surveillance system is to use the "air bridge" between Washington Heights, where the majority of our Dominican patient population resides, and the DR to measure the burden of road traffic injuries in both communities.

Guatemala: The Pop Wuj clinic project is a collective effort between New York Presbyterian Hospital's Emergency Department, a thriving socially-minded Spanish language school in Quetzaltenango, and the nonprofit organization Todos Juntos. The project was started in 2006 by Jonathon St. George, MD, PGY4 after raising funds to secure and renovate an unused space next to the Pop Wuj Spanish Language School. In Spring 2008, a medical brigade of NYP nurses and physicians, including Drs Rahul Sharma and Alexis Halpern, Weill Cornell EM attendings, spent two weeks caring for nearly 1,000 patients in Xela and the surrounding rural villages. For more info visit the website: http://www.popwujclinic.org/
Ghana: Dr. Rachel Moresky, Attending Physician at the Columbia campus and Coordinator of the International EM Fellowship, has received a planning grant from the GE Foundation for a pilot program: ‘Strengthening Health Systems - Improving Patient Care at the Ghana District Hospital.’ US-trained EPs will work at the district level hospitals in Ghana to provide bedside and didactic training, health systems process improvement and direct clinical service delivery. Melba Taylor, PGY4 will be our first EM resident to travel to Ghana under this grant in Fall 2008.
Montenegro: For the last 2 years, in a project led by Dr Allan Ross of the Children’s Hospital of New York (CHONY) Emergency Department, several NYP-Columbia Campus attendings (Drs. Robert Bristow, Veronica Hlibczuk, Chris Ingram, and Kiran Pandit) have joined forces with our pediatric colleagues to provide training in trauma management and medical emergencies in Ulcinj, Montenegro.
EMS training — Mumbai, India: Drs. Wallace Carter, Residency Director and Heidi Cordi, Columbia Attending have completed their initial inspection trip to India and will return to further their collaboration with Lifesupporters Institute of Health Sciences (LIHS) in India. The initiative currently supports over 70 ALS ambulances in Mumbai that are dispatched using a centralized computer order dispatch system with a centralized four digit telephone number that is the first of its kind in India.

Our residents and faculty participate actively in our hospitals and in our community.

NYP Columbia University Medical Center Department of Emergency Medicine Physician of the Year: Phillips Perera, MD, Director of EM Ultrasound - The Department of Emergency Medicine elects a faculty attending to honor as its Physician of the Year. Dr. Perera will receive this year's award for his commitment to the use of ultrasound to promote quality patient care, teaching and service to the New York-Presbyterian Emergency Department.
Weill Cornell Medical College awarded Dr. Jeremy Sperling, Assistant Residency Program Director, an Excellence in Teaching Award in June 2008 for his work in the Medicine Patient and Society Class.
NYP Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center Patient Safety Officer: Robert A. Green, MD, Associate Director, Department of Emergency Medicine - Dr. Green was appointed the Patient Safety Officer for the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.
Neal Flomenbaum, MD, Physician-in-Chief, Cornell campus, and James Giglio, MD Physician-in-chief, Columbia campus, co-chaired the 2008 NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Gala. This year’s annual Gala primarily benefited the Department of Emergency Medicine.
Jonathan St. George, MD, PGY4 is a recipient of the 2008 New York Weill Cornell Medical Center Alumni Council Distinguished Housestaff Awards. This award recognizes one member of the housestaff from each department for all around excellence.
NYP Weill-Cornell Quality Housestaff Committee: One of our chief residents, Jacqueline Mahal, MD, MBA PGY4 and a PGY3, Rishi Goyal, MD participate on this hospital-wide committee that meets monthly. The committee’s mission is to include housestaff input in quality efforts in all areas of the hospital.
Camp Amerikids: In Upstate New York, Camp Amerikids provides children with HIV-AIDS an opportunity to have a true summer camp experience. The camp medical directors, Drs. Bristow and Greenwald, along with Dean Straff, MD, one of our former Chief Residents, acting as a camp doctor are some of our beloved attendings. Each summer, several residents have "gone to camp" to treat the children in the infirmary and to teach the nurses that work at the camp.
Mentoring in Medicine: Tonya Walker, MD, PGY3 is involved in this program that encourages underrepresented minority children, adolescents and adults to pursue careers as health care professionals. She will attend the annual conference November 22, 2008. For more information see http://www.medicalmentor.org.