Hello OBGYN team,

Spring is blooming all around us and we are all looking forward to getting outside and safely spending time with family and friends. You have rallied once again to care for all of our patients with skill, compassion, and dedication.

As we see the decline of what we hope is our last Covid-19 surge, I continue to be amazed and so proud of how you have persevered. This newsletter highlights the incredible research, teaching, innovative care, and community service happening through your dedication and resilience.

Best,

Dee E. Fenner, MD

1 in 8 couples has trouble getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy. During National Infertility Awareness Week, Dr. Samantha Schon and her team provide helpful information for individuals and couples who are trying to conceive and answer questions about getting pregnant.

With most clinics closing before sign-outs, scheduling routine OBGYN care appointments can be difficult can be for learners! As part of their PGY-4 Quality Improvement (QI) projects, our residents run an after-hours OBGYN clinic 2x per year to help meet the needs of Michigan Medicine fellows, residents, and medical students.

For the last two years, the clinic has been led by Drs. Sarah Bell and Erin Inman. Next year, Drs. Cindy Lee and Ann Lozier will be taking the lead.

For their PGY-4 Quality Improvement (QI) project, Drs. Jasmine Ebott, Fatima Jibrel, and Marisa Sturza set out to improve communication on labor and delivery to prevent adverse clinical events and improve patient care.

They created a survey to evaluate the current sign-out process on our labor and delivery unit, identified the root causes of existing communication breakdowns, and proposed improvements to ensure accurate information transfer between day and night shifts and across multiple teams. The proposed improvements included establishing and testing new ground rules and standardized sign-out templates for all parties engaged in information transfer. The new ground rules and templates were well received and will continue to be used to improve patient care on labor and delivery in the future.

Dr. Courtney Townsel, MD, MS, participated in a Reproductive Justice Town Hall sponsored by Mothering Justice on April 16th.

The panel spoke about the shortage of Black obstetric physicians and birth workers and how this may limit the opportunity to find a race-congruent clinician. They focused on creating an open dialogue between patients and their care teams about fears of “dying” and not “feeling heard,” and discussed what practices and institutions are doing to eliminate Black maternal deaths and disparities in perinatal outcomes.

Dr. Townsel spoke about finding a physician and practice that centers the values of the patient, in this instance, Black women. She also discussed ways pregnant Black people can advocate for themselves during pregnancy and the birth process, including identifying their birth preferences early and sharing them with their care team along with educating themselves, family, and friends about common complications in pregnancy (e.g. preeclampsia, gestational diabetes).

The University of Michigan will be moving from MBox cloud-based storage to Dropbox by December 2021. In order to support OBGYN faculty and staff with this transition, Brian Hurd and Anca Tilea will be serving as our liaisons with the HITS migration team. Please keep your eye out for email updates from Brian and Anca about the migration and timeline!

Dr. Erica Elizabeth Marsh, MD, MSCI, FACOG was awarded $1.4 million dollars by the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) to fund her proposal entitled "'The Fierce Urgency of Now': Communities Conquering COVID (C3) - Supplement Proposal - Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy and Access."

This proposal is designed to directly address and decrease COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake among populations that experience COVID-19 related disparities. Dr. Marsh and her team will focus on three counties within Michigan where a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 is within African-American and Latinx communities. Using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, the team will identify the factors that contribute to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in AA and LX communities in Michigan in order to develop and pilot interventions to increase vaccine uptake and decrease vaccine hesitancy.

Dr. Marsh also received $3.47 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) to fund her project entitled "Community-Centered Interventions for Improved Vaccine Uptake for COVID (CIVIC)." This proposal will also seek to address and decrease COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake among populations that experience COVID-19 related disparities by:

Dr. Elizabeth Southworth is being honored for her exemplary initiative and dedication to medical student recruitment activities by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)’s department of Medical Student Affairs.

She was recognized at the ACOG Annual Business Meeting on Sunday, May 2.

Erica Odukoya, MPH, a fourth-year medical student at Michigan Medicine, recently received funding from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) to support her project entitled, “What do medical students need to thrive after failure? A needs assessment.”

The purpose of this project will be to conduct a mixed-methods needs assessment of medical students who experienced failure of internal high-stakes medical knowledge-based exams and learning specialists who interact with these students. Focus groups will be conducted for students at the University of Michigan Medical School and the University of California San Diego. Surveys will be disseminated to medical students broadly. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with medical school learning specialists. Subsequently, findings will be used to create recommendations for this population of students to improve academic performance. Dr. Helen Morgan will serve as Erica’s research mentor on the project.

Each senior medical student class selects 18 faculty (out of the thousands of clinical and basic science faculty at Michigan Medicine) to be included in their Class Composite Photograph that is displayed in the halls of Med Sci II. The students recognize these faculty as being important contributors to their medical school experience. Our department was well represented this year with Dr. Maya Hammoud, MD, MBA, Dr. Samantha Kempner, and Dr. Helen Morgan being chosen to be included within the 18.

The AAMC Central Group on Education Affairs (CGEA) Laureate Award recognizes senior members of the group for their important contributions to CGEA through leadership, development of other medical educators, impact on the CGEA annual program, and ongoing scholarly contributions that advance the discipline of medical education.

Congratulations to Dr. Lindsay Admon, MD, MSc, on receiving funding for AHRQ K08 Award to study the impact of perinatal insurance disruptions on adverse maternal and child health (MCH) outcomes!

This career development award will allow Dr. Admon to gain advanced methodologic training in econometrics, expertise in survey methodology (development, administration, and analysis), and practical skills working with Medicaid data and understanding Medicaid policy. Dr. Kara Zivin, PhD, and Dr. Vanessa Dalton, MD, MPH, will serve as members of her mentorship team.

The Faculty Innovation Award from the Graduate Medical Education Office at Michigan Medicine recognizes faculty who have made outstanding and innovative contributions to graduate medical education.

Congratulations to Shitanshu Uppal, MBBS, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Fellowship Director of Gynecologic Oncology training program, who was nominated by our residents and fellows for his innovation and dedication to graduate medical education.

Dr. Uppal is a trailblazer in graduate medical education. He is recognized for his dedication to both resident and fellow education, utilizing various teaching modalities to innovate surgical education. As the COVID virus disrupted the education of our residents and fellows, he created a website to facilitate gynecologic oncology education nationwide. Using a crowdsourcing methodology, he solicited fellowship directors from around the country to give lectures on Zoom to an audience of trainees. These lectures were recorded and cataloged on the website. Since its inception in April 2020, nearly 1,800 unique viewers have watched the videos 15,800 times. It’s a remarkable achievement in such a short span of time and is one example among many.

M-LEAD at the University of Michigan has honored the medical student-driven M Response Corps (MRC) with the Rosalie Ginsberg Dedicated Community Service Award through its Michigan Difference Student Leadership Awards (MDSLA) program.

The Ginsberg Award recognizes an individual and group who have made a positive, meaningful, and lasting impact in surrounding communities through social action and community engagement. This team of students is led and mentored by OBGYN faculty member, Dr. Deb Berman, MD.

Dr. Maya Hammoud, MD, MBA, was recently elected as an at-large member of the NBME Executive Board. Dr. Hammoud has chaired NBME’s International Foundations of Medicine (IFOM) Committee since 2016 and she currently serves on the International Oversight Committee.

 

The Executive Board oversees all activities of NBME and has full authority to act for NBME membership between the annual meetings. Other vital responsibilities of this group include appointing NBME’s President and CEO as well as reviewing and approving NBME’s budget and directing the policy and business of NBME. Lastly, the Executive Board ensures that the organization’s commitments, such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, are upheld.

Save the date for the 36th Annual Sager Day and the 2021 Abram Sager, MD Lecture, presented by ACOG CEO Maureen Phipps, MD, MPH.

Date: Wednesday, May 19th, 2021

Time: 1:00 pm

Location: Zoom

The Residency Programs at Michigan Medicine and St. Joseph Mercy Health System are committed to ensuring that trainees have the opportunity to learn and engage meaningfully in research during their training.

Sager Day is uniquely focused on supporting the professional growth and development of Residents conducting human subjects or basic science research through the dissemination of research findings and peer recognition. With the guidance of their faculty mentors, trainees have developed their own research proposals and built their critical thinking, experimental design and analysis, and science communication skills. Presentation at Sager Day represents the culmination of a trainee's research milestones and reflects preparedness for long-term academic success.

Please join us for the Department of OBGYN virtual Residency Program Graduation honoring the Class of 2021!

Date: Saturday, June 19th, 2021

Location: Zoom

Congratulations to our graduates, Drs. Bell, Ebott, Inman, Jibrel, and Sturza!

Mark your calendars for the 2021 Annual Norman F. Miller University of Michigan Alumni Society Meeting. This year's meeting will be held on Friday, September 24, 2021. Stay tuned for more details!

The MARTS (Michigan Alliance for Reproductive Technologies and Sciences) Conference aims to accelerate the growth of Reproductive Sciences in Michigan by enhancing collaboration and communication among educators and researchers in the basic, translational and clinical arenas.

Date: October 8th, 2021

Location: Rogel Ballroom, Michigan Union

Congratulations to Danielle Wilson, MHSA, our Women's Health (WH) Divison Administrative Assistant, who has been a vital member of our department for 10 years!

Danielle has spent all 10 years with the division of Women's Health, which has seen two division directors and grown from 24 faculty members to 35 since Danielle began. In her tenure, Danielle has not only provided administrative support to our WH providers but also contributed to our department's Quality Improvement efforts with Dr. Roger Smith and Simulation Training with Dr. Dave Marzano.

Danielle especially values the meaningful relationships she's created across our department, most notably with Dr. Rudi Ansbacher, whose mentorship she misses.

Dr. Okeoma Mmeje, MD, MPH, and the OBGYN DEI team are excited to announce the launch of two new DEI workgroups:

The team will also be continuing the work of the Birth Center/Maternal Care Workgroup, which is focused on improving communication between patients and the care team.

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The Creative Services photo studio is open again and accepting appointments!

The photo studio is located on the second floor of the North Campus Administrative Complex (NCAC). Faculty can currently sign up for a time in March or April.