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School of Medicine partners help advance our medical education mission Administration and Finance staff in the School of Medicine Dean’s Office help support high-intensity teaching

A New Financial Model to Support Our Most Dedicated Teachers: Administration and Finance staff in the School of Medicine Dean’s Office

This year, the School of Medicine finalized a model to ensure financial support of medical educators and to share those costs equitably among school departments. The model distributes the cost of the most intense teaching and leadership roles across departments, and expands the opportunity for ‘high-intensity teaching’ and leadership roles to faculty from all departments.

The process began in 2012 when Charles Hajek, formerly the School’s Executive Director for Resource Planning and Decision Support and Jenny Allen, a budget analyst in the School of Medicine, quantified the cost of high-intensity teaching based on metrics created by the 2010 Committee on Measuring the Educational Mission, chaired by Daniel West, MD.

Hajek and Allen, encouraged by Vice Dean for Education, Catherine Lucey, MD, were seeking a financial model that would improve and sustain the quality of teaching in the new UCSF Bridges Curriculum. Their work led to a task force of department managers who reviewed the data and proposed funding models to the Dean’s Budget and Finance Committee.

The committee debated the proposals while Hajek and Allen worked tirelessly to create and refine models based on committee input. The School of Medicine’s new ‘high-intensity teaching’ funding model was formalized in 2016 and supports educational leadership roles that require ten percent or more effort by a faculty member, for required interdisciplinary medical student education.

Maye Chrisman, the School of Medicine’s Vice Dean of Administration and Finance, sees the approval of the funds-flow model as her team’s biggest success last year. “We now have a predictable pool of funds to support our talented course directors and instructors,” says Chrisman, whose team partners with Department Chairs and managers to collect and distribute the funds.

Chrisman directs the financial, administrative, and clinical business affairs of the school, which comprises 28 departments, eight organized research units, and five interdisciplinary research centers. The collective teams carry an annual operating budget of approximately $2.4 billion.

“As the medical education team works to find, recruit, and retain the best teachers and course directors for our learners, our team works to create the best financial structure to support that,” says Allen.

“The Education Funds Flow is a real shift in the way faculty financially perceive teaching opportunities,” says Chrisman. “In general our faculty have to generate the funds to pay their own salaries, through research grants, patient care reimbursement, donations from grateful patients. etc. This model provides a clear source of funding to ‘protect’ their time so that they can teach. The new model is clear evidence to faculty that the School of Medicine recognizes and tangibly invests in their effort towards excellent teaching.”

S. Andrew Josephson, MD, Chair, Department of Neurology, is one of the School’s chairs who has worked with Chrisman to implement HIT and the Education Funds Flow. "This new approach has been incredibly useful to a number of our education-focused faculty, allowing us to guarantee that time spent on the educational mission was defined and rewarded just like our other missions,” says Dr. Josephson. “HIT helps us assure a long-term commitment to outstanding educational programs for our medical students."

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