David T. Stern

Biography

David T. Stern is Vice Chair for Professionalism in the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical School. Dr. Stern received his bachelor's degree in anthropology from Harvard University and his medical degree from Vanderbilt Medical School. He completed internship and residency in internal medicine at Tufts/New England Medical Center. He subsequently served as a fellow in Ambulatory Care and Research at Stanford and the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University School of Education in curriculum and teacher education. He served as Director of Standardized Patients, Co-Director of the Patient-Doctor course, and founding director of the international office, Global REACH (Research, Education and Collaboration for Health), at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Stern is a practicing general internist with a longstanding commitment to improving the quality of medical education locally and internationally.  His early research focused on identifying when, where, and how doctors learn professional behaviors.  He subsequently studied how to measure professional behavior for evaluation, certification, and prediction of future behavior.  He is the author of over 100 abstracts and papers on the topic, and is editor of "Measuring Medical Professionalism," published by Oxford University Press in 2006. He has served as a consultant and visiting professor at medical schools nationally and internationally, conducting workshops and seminars on teaching, learning, and evaluating professionalism. In his current position at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, he is working to improve patient care outcomes by ensuring the professional behavior of physicians.

In 2001, he was invited to participate as a member of the Core Committee of the Institute for International Medical Education and their project to evaluate outcome competencies of medical schools internationally. For the IIME pilot project in China, he directed the IIME task force on assessment, organized and managed faculty workshops, and organized the test administration in 2003. Subsequent international panels for standard setting at the student and school levels have helped the IIME to achieve its goal of measuring outcome standards in medical education. He is now President of the Institute for International Medical Education, an independent non-profit institute.

Combining his commitment to medical education and global health, Dr. Stern and colleagues at the University of Michigan recently developed a project to convert all educational materials (lectures, videos, e-learning tools) from the medical school to an open format for use in developing countries.  He is working with educational leaders from developing countries to co-create electronic educational materials that could facilitate the scaling-up of healthcare workforce.