by Danielle Ofri
CNN.com
Sept 16, 2010.

What exactly is the mission of a medical school? Is it to train the best and smartest doctors? Is to tend to our nation’s health? Is it to further medical knowledge?

Go to the website of just about any medical school and you will see roughly the same “three-pillars” message from the dean, or the chairman, or the residency program director. Every medical school stresses their commitment to the triumvirate of education, research, and patient-care.

In a new study, medical schools were rank by a three-pronged metric that measures three areas that are currently lagging in medicine: physicians working in primary care, physicians working in medically underserved regions, and physicians from minority groups.archers looked 60,000 medical students who graduated between 1999-2001 and calculated the percentage of who fell into these three categories. Essentially they added these values together to create a “social mission score.”

Though there wasn’t space to list all 141 American medical schools in the article, they did print the top 20 and the bottom 20. Having been a cut-throat medical student once myself, I immediately scanned the scores. I was crushed to find my institution nestled in the bottom 20 (oh, failure!), though we were in excellent company.

Read the full article on CNN.com.

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Danielle Ofri is a writer and practicing internist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients.

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