January 25, 2007
A conversation with Paul Ramsey, dean of the School of Medicine
By Marjorie Wenrich
Office of the Dean of Medicine
Editor’s note: Dr. Paul Ramsey became the administrative leader of UW Medicine in June 1997. As chief executive officer of UW Medicine, executive vice president for medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine, his job encompasses providing direction for the components of UW Medicine. These include the School of Medicine, Harborview Medical Center, UW Medical Center, UW Medicine Neighborhood Clinics and UW Physicians. UW Medicine also shares in the governance of Children’s University Medical Group and Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
On Monday, Feb. 5, Ramsey will talk about the School of Medicine’s 60-year history as well as current and future challenges and opportunities for UW Medicine. His address, UW Medicine: 2007 and Beyond, will take place from 5 to 6 p.m. in Hogness Auditorium, Health Sciences Building. A reception will follow. In this interview, Ramsey provides a glimpse of the state of UW Medicine in 2007.
Q: What led you to medicine in the first place?
A: In high school, I was attracted to a career as a basic scientist in physics or chemistry. Near the end of high school, I spent a summer working with a pathologist at a community hospital. He was responsible for all aspects of pathology and laboratory medicine, including microbiology. His practice was focused on using the best scientific approaches to make a diagnosis and he encouraged me to pursue each diagnosis as if I was the patient’s physician. When I reviewed a slide, I would review the patient’s history and think about all aspects of the patient’s care. That experience made me, for the first time, think about a career in medicine.
Q: What pathway led you to your current position?
A: I’ve been fortunate in my life. I’ve enjoyed every job I have had. Early in my faculty career, in addition to seeing patients, teaching and doing research in the Department of Medicine, I was asked to take on responsibilities for administration, initially related to teaching programs. And then, by the mid-1980’s, I was asked to take on administrative responsibilities that went beyond the teaching programs for the department. I found that I enjoyed those in the same way that I’ve enjoyed all of my professional responsibilities. So I gradually shifted my profile, over a period of about 10 years.
Q: What are the challenges of being a CEO/executive vice president/dean?
A: We are a very large and complex organization. Given our size, communication is a constant challenge. There is a major challenge also in integrating teaching, research and patient care programs.
Educational activities and patient care always have been integrated, and we need to continue to expand on that so that there is truly an active patient-centered and learner-centered process for all involved. It’s extremely important for medical education to be moving more and more to an active learning model.
Integration of research with clinical activities has always occurred, but needs to occur more, as basic science advances related to genome sciences and other areas identify new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent diseases. The knowledge base of medicine is advancing rapidly, and it’s extremely important to test the assumptions that are based on that knowledge in actual practice.
When new best practices are identified, UW Medicine is an ideal setting to use those approaches to care for patients and create multiple opportunities for interdisciplinary active learning. Going forward, we need to do even more than we’re doing now, to integrate the full range of research activities into the way we think about and conduct the teaching and patient care activities.
Q: What kind of potentials do electronic medical records present for integrating medicine?
A: One of the reasons that we are focusing so many resources on information technology is the opportunity for advances in our IT systems to make it more efficient to integrate active learning with patient care and research. Electronic medical record systems can provide real-time, up-to-date information. In the future, it will be possible for electronic medical records to be interactive and to make suggestions related to selection of diagnostic tests and therapies. An example would be if a physician has made a diagnosis and is choosing an antibiotic, the information system should be able to provide advice about the cost and the effectiveness of the antibiotic in the situation in which it’s being used.
It will require years of hard work by large numbers of individuals to take advantage of the opportunities that the information systems present. The best place to do this work is at UW Medicine, one of the world’s leading academic medical centers.
Q: What do you enjoy most about what you do?
A: I have great respect for our mission. I take great joy when we can make improvements in teaching, research and patient care that will lead to improvements in health. And I enjoy the process. I enjoy working with my many, many colleagues in UW Medicine.
Q: How do you juggle your many roles and activities?
A: I can’t possibly be an expert in the multiple areas of work that are needed to pursue our mission and I must rely on many colleagues who are experts. I enjoy that diversity of activities and the active learning involved for me. I really enjoy learning about areas in which I haven’t worked as much in my past life.
Q: What is the state of UW Medicine in 2007?
A: There are very few academic medical centers with the quality and depth of research, educational and clinical programs that UW Medicine has. The excellence of our research programs spans the basic sciences, the clinical sciences, and what are now being described as the translational sciences. Our educational programs include more than 4,000 students and trainees and are considered among the very best in the world. Our patient care programs are also highly ranked. Our hospitals are ranked among the very best in the country and our health professionals are also among the very best in the world.
Due to the outstanding work of thousands of individuals, UW Medicine is one of the very best academic medical centers in the world.
We have challenges, however, and those challenges are being faced by our peers as well. We need to work to improve the health care system. We need to work to improve the quality of patient care. We need to address the rising costs of health care. We need to be working, locally, on improving quality and reducing costs and on playing an increasing role in the country in addressing the problems with our health care system.
We have opportunities, in the next five years, that are incredibly exciting: opportunities to develop the best program in the world in global health; opportunities to be leaders in exciting areas of research, such as stem cell biology and regenerative medicine; opportunities to be leaders in development of programs to use simulation to train and evaluate the skills of health professionals more effectively. The future for UW Medicine is extremely bright.
Q: What has led to UW Medicine’s many accolades?
A: The UW is a university with a very strong culture of collaboration, collegiality, and interdisciplinary work. Early in our history, being somewhat isolated from other parts of the country in the Northwest, we have broken new ground in many areas. With the underpinning of our collegial, interdisciplinary approach, we have, in our history in the health sciences, not accepted the traditional ways of doing things. We moved medical education out of the hospital in the city to the community setting. We began caring for patients in the outpatient setting, when hospitals in the Northeast were keeping those same patients in the hospital for a week or more. We have developed new approaches to diagnosis and treatment that have broken the traditional models. In all of our areas of work, the faculty, staff, students, and trainees have been innovative and have benefited from their interdisciplinary approaches.
Q: What do you do to unwind?
A: I work long hours and truly enjoy my job. And I am very fortunate to have a wonderful family. My wife [Dr. Bonnie Ramsey, professor of pediatrics] and I have focused our lives away from our professional careers on our children. My activities to unwind outside of medicine have been focused on my family, on exercise, and on projects such as home remodeling. I spend at least an hour every day exercising. And I also read for relaxation.
Q: Tell me about your exercise.
A: I believe in integrating exercise into one’s daily life, in walking when you can, taking stairs rather than elevators. My most active exercise occurs between 5 and 6:30 in the morning. On most days, I will be rowing on Lake Union or Lake Washington, in the early morning hours. I also run occasionally. I ran the Seattle/UWMC half marathon last November. I ride a road bike and am planning to do the Seattle-to-Portland ride with my daughter on a tandem bicycle this coming summer.
I climbed Mount Rainier with my son several years ago. One of the greatest pleasures of my life was to stand with my son for about an hour on the top of Mount Rainier on a perfectly clear day to celebrate his 21st birthday.
Q: How has it been being a two-physician family?
A: It’s worked extremely well. Our daughter chose to go into medicine, saying she wanted to be a physician like her mother. And I’m quite proud of that. My wife understands my work demands and I understand her work demands. Bonnie enjoys her work and I enjoy mine. We both feel extremely fortunate to be in Seattle at the University of Washington.
