news – Tarrant County Physician Online

Student Article: Carrying the Torch

By Olivia Mayer, OMS-II, TCOM

In one way or another, I have always been tied to medicine by an invisible string. One of my fondest memories of my childhood was around the age of five, when I would help my mom put together goodie-baskets for the oncology patients she would be visiting the upcoming week. This was a Sunday ritual for my mother and me, one we did while simultaneously baking chocolate chip cookies in the oven. No, my mom is not a medical provider; she is a pharmaceutical sales rep who spent any extra time she had on the weekends creating those baskets to show the patients that were taking part in clinical trials for the lymphoma drug she sold that she cared about them. This was an act out of pure benevolence and servitude for those who needed it more than the average person.

In a similar light, my grandmother spent most of her nursing career as a breast cancer nurse in Buffalo, New York. Growing up, I remember Grandma always sharing her favorite memories as a nurse. She was glowing with pride when I told her that I had a similar interest in oncology. Fast forward to today—now Grandma and I share conversations and exchange information about new developments in the breast cancer world. It is truly a full-circle moment with a touch of nostalgia from my younger days. Now as a medical student, I have the immense privilege to carry the torch of my mother and grandmother into my own medical journey. Besides being introduced to this field at a very early age, oncology has piqued my interest by its very nature. The endless opportunities to become a pioneer in cancer research or navigate complex treatment options that can potentially impact countless lives is truly the epitome of medicine, and continues to be the center of my “why.”

It has always been extremely important to me that I seek out any opportunity to create an impact in this field, just as my mother and grandmother did. As the current vice president for my school’s Oncology Student Interest Group (OSIG), I have had the amazing opportunity to assist in cultivating a tight-knit community of passionate students united by a shared commitment to being a source of support and positive change for patients during their most vulnerable moments.

One of the most significant moments I have had serving as a leader of this organization was in honoring the memory of my childhood friend, Zach, who passed away from astrocytoma in the fall of 2018. I felt a personal calling to head an OSIG fundraiser in honor of Zach and in support of his charity, the Big Z Foundation. The Big Z Foundation is led by Zach’s mother and father and financially supports terminally ill children and their families around the DFW area. Just in time for North Texas Giving Day on September 19th of this year, OSIG was able to raise hundreds of dollars for the Big Z Foundation. This support will help local families by assisting with the cost of their hospital bills, treatments, and housing costs. I can only describe the feeling I experienced as true enrichment when I surprised Zach’s parents on behalf of OSIG with our collective donations for the charity. The profound gratitude they expressed is something I will forever hold near and dear.

In moments like this, sharing acts of servitude and benevolence with fellow classmates is an experience so rewarding that it is impossible to fully express in words. This journey has brought me a feeling of gratification in service that is similar to the one I reminisce about when remembering making oncology patient baskets in my childhood. As I continue on my path in medicine, it is my personal mission to continue these acts of benevolence and shed light on those around me so that the flame of my mother’s and grandmother’s torch continues to be passed forward and illuminate a new generation’s impact on the field of oncology.

Project Access Tarrant County: Growth in 2025

by Kathryn Keaton

Another year has come and gone, and Project Access Tarrant County is beginning its fourteenth full year of serving Tarrant County.

While a full 2024 annual report will be included in the next edition of Tarrant County Physician, we did experience growth and are excited that new relationships in our community are bringing new things for this year. Here’s what you can expect to see from us in the next twelve months.

Staffing

In February 2024, PATC hired a new full-time bilingual case manager, Karla Aguilar. Karla was not new to PATC—she originally came to us in 2021 to complete her internship for her undergraduate degree in public health. Over the past ten months, Karla has refreshed our enrollment and application process, increasing overall efficiency.

PATC also has an additional new employee starting this month. Joanna Lopez, our part-time bilingual program specialist, will be the first point of contact for all new referrals and will assist with processing referrals, prescreening patients, reviewing paperwork, and keeping up with patient communication.

Interns and Volunteers

In the fall of 2024, PATC invited freshman medical students from both the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU and UNT Health Science Center to volunteer with us. These students have been instrumental in keeping us on top of new referrals and other data entry. We will continue to have medical student volunteers and appreciate the time they give, however limited. Two incoming TCU students have chosen PATC for their four-year Scholarly Pursuit and Thesis (SPT) project—we’ll have more information on those projects in the following paragraphs.

In an exciting development, PATC recently finalized an agreement with the UTA School of Public Health that makes us a sanctioned site for undergraduate and graduate students’ internships, which are required for graduation. In January, three of these undergraduate interns will work in the Project Access office part-time. In addition to assisting with daily PATC activities, they will also each complete a special project related to improving or expanding Project Access services.

The TCMS Alliance also lent support over this year. We appreciate our Alliance volunteers that assist with data entry, appointment follow-ups, and patient communication.

Patient Education

In the May/June 2024 issue of Tarrant County Physician, the PATC article focused on ways PATC navigates social determinants of health. Since that article, Karla and a first-year medical student at TCU have written a curriculum geared toward PATC patients to address common barriers to medical care as part of this medical student’s SPT project. We plan to host the first class in March of 2025. It will address medication compliance and teach not only about the importance of taking medication for chronic diseases but also how to understand medication instructions, warnings, and other labels patients may see on their bottles. Future class topics may include basic financial literacy, applying for state benefits, and teaching patients how to ask their medical team questions in order to understand their conditions and care plans. We are coming up with incentives to encourage patient attendance, and we have every reason to believe this will be a great success.

Technology

PATC has used CareScope, a database that holds patient and volunteer information, since 2011. CareScope continues to provide what we need from a demographic and reporting standpoint; however, it is limited in its communication abilities. Fortunately, a new innovative program called CareMessage offered a grant to Project Access to use its software for two years. CareMessage will allow PATC staff to communicate with patients through text messages regarding appointments, enrollment deadlines, and post-appointment questions. In addition, we will be able to select sub-groups of our patients for reminders about preventive care, invite patients to our classes mentioned above, and distribute pre- and post-surveys needed for funding purposes. Another TCU medical student has chosen to work on CareMessage as his SPT project. He will assist with setting up the technology, integrating it into CareScope, and creating processes and content that we will be able to build on for years to come.

In addition, PATC launched a new website in September 2024, which you can visit at http://www.tcam.org. This website hosts all Tarrant County Academy of Medicine programs but focuses on PATC. We still have two developmental phases to go through before we have our fully operational website, but here, donors and supporters will be able to support us and find general information much more easily than before.

Fundraising and Capacity Building

As a recipient of the 2024 Community’s Foundation ToolBox Grant, our project was to create and implement a 12-month operational plan—think like a mini-strategic plan. We worked with a consultant, analyzed processes, met with focus groups, and wrote a month-by-month strategy for 2025 to recruit and retain volunteers and expand funding opportunities. Grant writing will continue, and individual giving will be given increased focus.

Patient Services

In addition to the above, our main day-to-day activities will remain the same. Our goal is to serve 250 patients in 2025, including performing 100 surgical procedures. We aim to fully utilize the 48 surgical cases Park Hill Surgery Center has committed to, with the other 52 cases being performed among our other hospital partners. We have strategies in place to make strides to reduce and perhaps even eliminate the general surgery and gynecology waiting lists.

Conclusion

We are excited about what this year will hold, and we look forward to sharing it with our supporters. In addition to the PATC column in the magazine, please be sure you are subscribed to our monthly e-newsletter and follow us on social media as we share our 2025 successes.

TMA Poster Session: Shaping Research and Health Policy

Student Article

by Naimah Sarwar, MS-IV

When medical students don their freshly starched white coats for their first days of medical school, they cross the bridge from being a patient to also becoming a clinician. This evolution, from one side of the doctor-patient relationship to the other, provides medical students a unique perspective. It is at this phase of our training that we arguably have the greatest ability to have clear insight into the nuances of the healthcare system. Armed with the textbook knowledge of how to recognize, diagnose, and treat our patients’ ailments, we have a front row seat to the struggles our patients have in accessing the care they need. We also become privy to the ever-growing challenges that physicians face in providing quality care to their patients while also caring for themselves. With fresh eyes, we witness the successes and failures of the healthcare system. This lens brings into focus much of the scholarly activity medical students engage in. Our curiosity and motivation to advocate for our patients drives us to ask questions, design research projects, and share our findings with others.

The poster session at the 2024 TexMed conference that took place in Dallas this year provided medical students the perfect venue to share such scholarly work with fellow attendees. Participants were required to submit an abstract outlining their projects that were then reviewed in a selection process. Once selected, presenters designed and submitted their posters for display in the gallery. Posters were judged by attendees of the conference for recognition with the “People’s Choice Award.” The gallery provided local students with an opportunity to present their work and featured several posters from the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine and Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine.

The works submitted covered a variety of topics, from advocacy and medical education to public health and the presentation of clinical cases. A team of students from the Burnett School of Medicine, including Carter Clatterbuck, MS-IV, and Peter Park, MS-IV, presented on the effects of the new Texas abortion legislation on medical school admission rates. They found that after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there was a significant drop in female applicants to Texas medical schools. Many physicians stopped at the poster, surprised at how quickly health policy seems to have influenced the decisions of future students and reflected on the effects of certain health policies on their own specialties.

As a first-time presenter at the conference this year, my poster outlined my project investigating patients who connected with specialty care through Project Access. Project Access connects underserved patients who do not have access to insurance to charity care, particularly specialists and surgical services. I wanted to investigate the utilization of these services in order to better understand gaps in access to care locally. The project was inspired by an interaction on my very first day of outpatient clinic, where an unfunded patient was struggling to connect with a specialist they needed. Through my work, I hope to identify where vulnerable patients that fall through the cracks end up seeking care and the burden that inaccessibility to care places on our health system.

During the poster session, I had conversations with physicians that broadened my understanding of the challenges different communities face. One physician from the Rio Grande Valley shared how his community had a shortage of specialists. Many of his patients were thus forced to present to the emergency department with complex diseases without the specialty care they needed. In another conversation, I spoke with a retired local rheumatologist about how many of his patients would lose their jobs due to complications of their conditions. When they lost their jobs, they lost their health insurance and, by extension, access to their immunotherapies. These stories raised so many questions about further areas for study, and I realized that there is no-one-size-fits all solution to the challenges we face in our different communities.

Our clinical experiences and patient narratives have the potential to become major drivers for shaping research and health policy. The TexMed poster session fostered dialogue and facilitated the exchange of ideas between students, physicians, researchers, and clinicians from across Texas with a shared passion for policy and advocacy work. The opportunity to share research findings and to use that research as a springboard for discussions on what our work means to our patients and our practice was immensely valuable.

TexMed 2024: Education Outside of the Classroom

Student Article

by Ashley Taylor, OMS-I

When I received an email from the Texas Medical Association inviting me and other medical students to the annual TexMed conference, my initial thought was that it might be fun to do something other than go to class and study that weekend. I had no idea what TexMed was all about or why I was invited as a first-year medical student, but the thought of a change of scenery was very appealing to me, so I decided to sign up. To my surprise, I was unable to convince any of my friends to attend with me. As more of an introverted individual, the idea of going alone was daunting, but I am beyond happy that I did.

The first night I arrived at TexMed, I attended the Medical Student Section Networking Event where I met dozens of students from around the state, including several from my own school with whom I had not previously had the opportunity to become acquainted. I also began to meet physicians from various parts of the state; each of them was surprisingly friendly, engaging, and eager to get to know me and answer my questions. I am not sure why I was under the impression that the title “networking event” implied that we would all be sitting at a formal table while I tried my best to remember all of my manners while struggling to make conversation with some highly accomplished physician who did not wish to speak to me, but my expectations could not have been more off the mark. I had not been there five minutes before Melissa Garretson, MD, from Cook Children’s Medical Center was offering me her phone number and agreeing to come speak at the next UNTHSC Pediatrics Club meeting that I was organizing. I was blown away by her willingness to help me, a student she had just met, and this feeling continued the rest of the evening as I met more and more physicians who were equally kind and eager to help me succeed. I quickly grew comfortable in this new setting and could not wait to return the next day.

Friday morning came around, and I took my seat with thousands of others in the expo hall for the Opening General Session. Harvey Castro, MD, gave us a presentation on the future of medicine involving AI and what this means for us as students and physicians. His talk was both fascinating and terrifying, but what I really gathered from that morning was the realization that medicine is constantly changing and that it is crucial for all of us to stay up to date on innovations and advancements in the field in order to provide the highest quality care to patients. Another key point that I took away from his lecture was that every person there has a purpose. I found it truly inspiring to look around the room at so many different faces, knowing that we all shared the same objective of learning how we can be the best physicians possible so that we can then provide our best to others.

When the morning’s opening events were complete and we were free to attend our meetings of choice, I headed to what I found to be the most entertaining part of the weekend: the reference committee meetings. Wanting to learn more about healthcare policy, I took a seat in the Science and Public Health committee meeting, per the suggestion of a physician I had just met at lunch, completely oblivious as to how it would work. A few minutes in, I began to understand why he had made this suggestion. I was completely enthralled by the debates unfolding before me, and, naively, I had not expected such current, controversial topics to be discussed. I did my best to absorb all of the information and opinions being presented while frantically googling terms I had never heard and taking notes on the key points that I wanted to use later as subjects for my own research. This meeting was easily the highlight of the conference for me as well as an invaluable learning experience. When I started medical school last summer, I thought the only thing I would ever need to care about again was learning science and doing research, but I now know that there is much, much more to practicing medicine.

My weekend at TexMed ended up being one of the most transformative educational experiences of my life. From meeting physicians of all ages and from all different fields to learning how TMA adopts policies and what they stand for as an organization, I gained more from the conference than I could have ever imagined. I understand now that practicing medicine involves more than scientific knowledge and empathy toward patients. In order to truly put patients’ best interests first, we, as current and future physicians, must be involved on a much larger scale outside of the hospital. It is our responsibility to stay up to date on ever-changing technological advancements, to form and maintain relationships with other physicians and healthcare workers so that we may work as a successful team, and to identify areas of healthcare that need improvement. We need to then introduce and adopt policies that will benefit our patients while also allowing us to effectively practice medicine. Who knew I could learn so much outside of the classroom?