Nephrology Fellowship Innovations and Awards

Burton “Bud” Rose developed UpToDate, the preeminent evidence-based, physician-authored clinical decision support resource that clinicians trust to make the point-of-care decisions while an active member of our division. This resource is updated regularly by more than 6,500 physician authors, editors and peer reviewers, who provide evidence-based recommendations that are read by over 1.3 million clinicians in 187 countries and nearly 90% of major academic medical centers in the United States. The first “cards” in UpToDate were based on chapters from Dr. Rose’s book “Clinical Physiology of Acid-Base and Electrolyte Disorders”!

The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratories (Maine) is a year-round, independent, non-profit research institution, where many fundamental early discoveries in renal physiology were made. BIDMC faculty including Dr. Franklin Epstein, a past Division Chief and Department Chair at Beth Israel Hospital were intimately involved with these discoveries and oversaw the Lab operations in the 1980s and 1990s. The Lab now hosts a number of courses during the summers, many of which are dedicated to renal physiology. Dr. Mark Zeidel, Chair of Medicine at BIDMC and member of the Renal division, has played an instrumental role in developing, directing and teaching these courses. Courses include the "Origins of Renal Physiology - TREKS" for medical students and the "Origins of Renal Physiology: Fellows." Dr. Stewart Lecker and Dr. Martin Pollak have each taught in these courses for a number of years as well.

Dr. Jeffrey William and Dr. Mark Zeidel also teach in another course offered at MDIBL for hospitalists looking to incorporate more physiology into their teaching, called "Physiology on the Fly."

Dr. Ali Poyan-Mehr, former faculty member, founded the The Glomerular Disease Study & Trial Consortium (GlomCon). GlomCon aims to bring together clinical nephrologists, pathologists, researchers and biotechnology innovators to create a network of stakeholders interested in helping patients with glomerular kidney disease. Through this network of collaborations, GlomCon aims to make the collective expertise of its members available for discussion of individual cases through monthly Glomerular Disease Case Conferences, provide infrastructure for future biomarker studies, enable genomic research and facilitate clinical trials.

Dr. Nikhil Agrawal and Dr. Stewart Lecker then created The GlomCon Teaching Tool (GlomCon Trivia), an educational initiative for Nephrology Fellowship Training Programs and winner of the 2017 ASN Innovations in Kidney Education Contest. These web-based sessions are designed specifically for trainees (medical students, residents, fellows) and address the content of the month's Glomerular Disease Case Conference. Through this teaching tool, trainees have networked with each other beyond geographical boundaries to discuss glomerular disease management, and to learn about regional variation in disease presentation, diagnosis and management approaches.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) redesigned their curriculum in 2015 called “Pathways.” This new curriculum incorporates pedagogical approaches that foster active learning and critical thinking, earlier clinical experience, advanced clinical and basic/population science experiences and a scholarly project that allows every student to plan an individual pathway to the MD degree. Dr. Melanie Hoenig played an integral role in this development as co-chair of the Steering Committee and director of the Homeostasis 2 course (an integrated course of Renal, Endocrine and Gastrointestinal pathophysiology). Dr. Jeffrey William serves as a core faculty member of both Homeostasis 1 and 2 courses, and Dr. Stewart Lecker serves as a core faculty member of Homeostasis 2.

Dr. Robert Cohen, a leading expert in communication skills for nephrologists, recognized almost a decade ago that nephrology fellows were not being trained in how to approach challenging conversations with patients who have advanced kidney disease. He developed a full-day annual course for all of the first-year nephrology fellows in the Harvard-affiliated renal fellowships in which they learn and practice skills and approaches for complex conversations with nephrology patients. This novel curriculum has become a model for similar courses that have since been developed around the United States.

Cohen RA, Jackson VA, Norwich D, Schell JO, Schaefer K, Ship AN, Sullivan AM. A Nephrology Fellows' Communication Skills Course: An Educational Quality Improvement Report. Am J Kidney Dis. 2016 Aug; 68(2):203-211. PMID: 26994686.

For more information, please check out these National Kidney Disease Education program videos on communication, produced by Dr. Cohen.

Dr. John Danziger, Dr. Jeffrey William and Dr. Mark Zeidel (along with Visible Body) created a series of high-fidelity animated videos to help teach the physiology of water balance. This module is a comprehensive, interactive and clinically applicable approach to the management of disorders of water balance (dysnatremias), followed by a quiz to check understanding of the content. This innovation was selected as a winner of the 2015 ASN Innovations in Kidney Education Contest and is readily available as a teaching tool.

"The Organization for Renal Care in Haiti (TORCH), Inc. is a charitable non-profit 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization (http://torchforhaiti.org/) with Robert S. Brown, MD as its Founder, President and Board Chairman. TORCH is dedicated to saving lives by bringing education and kidney care, including dialysis and kidney transplantation, to patients with acute or chronic renal failure in Haiti, initially at the Partners in Health facility, the Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais (HUM) and then at the State University of Haiti Medical School in Port-au-Prince. TORCH has helped educate the HUM medical residents in the USA at BIDMC and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and in France. With this program, HUM has become the first ACGME-accredited hospital in a low income country. We have helped train HUM staff to initiate hemodialysis at HUM, saving the lives of about two-thirds of more than 100 patients with acute kidney injury thus far. We plan to train Haitian physicians and nurses in peritoneal dialysis for chronic treatment of children and adults on a limited scale and for kidney transplantation at HUM. We will start preventive measures to screen for hypertension, diabetes or kidney disease in the community surrounding Mirebalais and initiate a research study of the prevalence of high risk APOL1 genotypes for chronic kidney disease in the Haitian population.