Within the next year, the Hopkins Medical School and University of Baltimore Law School will be working together in a joint venture to encourage communication between the professions. The Center will be located at the PLACE, with both offices currently being hosted on the Hopkins medical campus.
“It’s a coming together of a law school and a medical school and what we’re trying to do is to start a center that’s going to start looking at how law effects the actual way doctors practice medicine,” University of Baltimore Law School Dean Phillip Closius said. “So we’re going to start examining the legal issues that are starting to affect the practice of medicine with a kind of sub-idea that doctors and lawyers have to start cooperating. That the two professions really can’t see themselves adversarial if we want to get some meaningful solutions to a while range of health problems.”
Dr. Fred Levy, co-director of the center also explained the function of the center in an email to The News-Letter. Levy holds a JD/MD degree.
“Center activities will focus on research, education and training of both disciplines,” he wrote. “We will research critical health law questions like tort reform and patient safety, educate the professions by holding regional and national conferences with both groups in attendance and have training programs throughout all levels from students through and including post graduate training programs.”
Levy hopes that the center will eventually be able to weigh in on health law issues.
“Ultimately, we hope to influence health law policy once we have been able to establish ourselves as a premiere academic national resource.”
Along with Levy, the center will be directed by Greg Dolin, another attorney-physician. Levy said one of their primary focuses will be in making the center grow.
“My role will be to co-direct center operations,” Levy wrote. “That will include long-range strategic planning about the issues that the center will focus on. Initially, my co-director and I will focus on prioritizing projects and recruiting affiliate faculty from around the country to help us with our efforts.”
The center has other similar institutions to model after, like one such entity at Florida State University. The Hopkins-University of Baltimore center, however, will be different.
“The main difference and what sets ours apart is that other centers, to our knowledge, do not specifically focus on the doctor-lawyer relationship,” Levy wrote. “They focus on training law students, public health professionals, patients; all of which are important, but that is the main difference.”
Though the center is a collaborative effort, it will not grant degrees. Rather, it will be a facility that will give law students and medical students the opportunity to collaborate.
“It’s going to give an opportunity for medical students and law students to interact,” Closius said. “ It’s going to sponsor a symposium, it’s going to take position papers on a whole variety of issues as things come up. But there’s no degree that’s granting out of it.
The center has been a collaborative effort between the law school and medical school. As Closius explained it, the idea came about roughly three years ago and there was informal dialogue between the two.
“As it developed, Hopkins put out an RFP — a request for proposals,” Closius said. “I know a number of law schools responded. So, this was [for] a while [a] public thing where they put out a request for proposals where a number of law schools responded and the Hopkins people decided that our proposal was the one that was best for them.”
As for where the center is being housed, Closius said both directors will be housed at Hopkins until the completion of a new building on the University of Baltimore’s campus — to be completed in late fall of 2012.
“Once the new building is created, we will also provide some office space in the new building here at the University of Baltimore,” Closius said. “Once the new building is up, there will be office space both at Hopkins and at Baltimore’s Law school for the center.”
Resources offered by the center will not be required by students. But as the center develops, it is not known whether courses the center may offer in the future will become part of the schools’ curricula.
“I don’t know if the classes will be required — that would be up to either school independently,” Closius said. “For example, I’m already teaching three one-hour lectures at the Hopkins Medical School to the second year medical class. As part of that, we also have the medical students in small sections reviewing three different cases and we have 15 law students who are working with the small groups in reviewing the case. That’s a good example of an interaction that is then going to be under the center once we get the center up and going.”
Closius said that, all in all there are hopes that there will be a great amount of student involvement and communication between the two schools.
“Everything we do ultimately we would like to have as a benefit to students in some form or another,” Closius said. “So, obviously the symposium students from both institutions will be invited to the symposium. As I say, we’re already doing something where we do la students discussing legal things with med students. I know we envisioned it going the other way too.
“We’d like to get medical students to come over and participate in some form in our healthcare courses. If we go to a journal there will be work for students in that. We’re already doing a number of things with Hopkins that kind of [have] just been going on that are now going to be brought under the banner of the center.”
The budget for the center, so far, is remaining fluid because they aren’t sure exactly how much will be expended.
“We’re still kind of figuring it out a little bit,” Closius said. “There’s a budget in the sense that there is a Hopkins doctor, we have our doctor, we know what they’re being paid, fringe benefits, all that. We know about what it’s going to take to get a fellow, we know about what we’re willing to pay for that.
“We’re going to be supplying some travel money for the faculty, to fellow some marketing money, some seed money, things like that. We’re not 100 percent sure about the symposium in terms of whether they’re for free or we’ll charge. The bulk of the additional budget is going to be [for] salaries and travel money and that sort of stuff.”
On the Hopkins end, Levy said that there is no extra money being spent.
“Hopkins (department of EM) is bringing its existing program to form the joint center. There are no new dollars or space being assigned to initiate the newly configured joint center from Hopkins,” Levy wrote.
Levy wrote that the center already has some directives they wish to accomplish during its first year.
“We are looking to accomplish a few fundamental things,” he wrote. “We would like to recruit a complement of affiliate “subject matter” experts so that depending on the issue to be examined, we have someone or can recruit someone to help us study the issue.
We want to develop the correct infrastructure and administrative component so that the center can evolve and grow and we would like to plan a major conference [the subject of which is undecided but will likely deal with healthcare reform]. Additionally, we plan to develop and launch a website as a clearinghouse for the professions and others interested in health law.”
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