Arthur Feldman hopes to serve the North Philly community and unite students practicing in various medical spheres.
After spending nine years at Thomas Jefferson University, Dr. Arthur Feldman will assume positions of executive dean of the School of Medicine and chief academic officer of Temple University Health System, effective Sept. 1.
The executive dean position is a new job title, created under Dr. Larry Kaiser, dean of TUSM, to unite the school and health system under a single leader. By uniting the two, Feldman hopes to integrate the research and education done in the medical school with the training done in the hospital.
“My responsibilities are primarily the educational and research missions of the medical school,” Feldman said.
Feldman said building better relationships between doctors and patients is something he would like students to learn while in the program.
“We need to start at the level of the medical students and we need to make sure they’re learning how to make those connections,” Feldman said.
Medical students will also learn how to work as a part of a multidisciplinary team made up of other students studying health professions.
“We’ve never served this team approach to students, so we’re going to try and develop new ways to try and teach team-based medical care almost on day one of medical school,” Feldman said.
To do so, Feldman said, students from different medical realms will work with one another.
Beyond the scope of TUSM, Feldman also hopes his position as chief academic officer of TUHS will help him serve the North Philadelphia community.
Feldman plans on tackling the major metabolic diseases affecting North Philadelphia including diabetes and obesity, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and neurological diseases.
“The challenge for us is not just doing research about those diseases in a laboratory, but then translating what we find in the laboratories to actually impact the care that the patients receive,” Feldman said.
The focus will be on improving the health of the community by, “teaching medical students how to transition care from care they give at the hospital, to the patient in their home,” Feldman said.
Feldman said coming to Temple is an opportunity to test a number of things he’s written about and thought about, through the administrative level.
At Jefferson, Feldman was the chairman of the department of medicine.
Temple’s reputation also seemed to seal the deal for his move up Broad Street.
“[Temple] has an incredible history of teaching and research. There are leading academic scholars across the country that trained at Temple, so it has a great history behind it,” Feldman said. “Second of all, for me, it offers the opportunity to come work for Dr. Larry Kaiser who I have an incredible amount of respect for.”
Luis Rodriguez can be reached at luis.fernando@temple.edu.
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