2022 Fall STAR Educator Recipient: Megan Freeman, MD
Megan Freeman, MD
Associate Professor
Department of Medicine, Associate Program Director for the IM Residency
Nomination Submission:
Dr. Megan Freeman excels as a clinician educator and impacts learners across the undergraduate and graduate medical education spectrum. As Associate Program Director, she transformed curricular elements of the IM residency’s quality improvement and safety program by engaging residents both in systems thinking through a series of workshops and through longitudinal quality improvement projects that each resident cohort completes each year. These cohorts, one of which Dr. Freeman personally leads, regularly disseminate their scholarship at regional and national meetings. Over the past decade, these projects have led to multiple improvements in care for individual patients and the health care system. As an Associate Program Director for the IM Residency, she continues to refine that program and expand the footprint of resident driven quality improvement.
As Associate Clerkship Director, she helped navigate disruptions caused by COVID-19, while maintaining outstanding clinical learning environments and enhancing online, synchronous education sessions. For instance, she created a case-based module that addresses common, chronic pulmonary conditions, while challenging learners to consider how different social determinants of health could affect safe, patient disposition. In addition to her roles with the residency and clerkship, Dr. Freeman has also served on the Long School of Medicine’s curriculum committee and recently was chosen to serve as chair of the evaluation subcommittee. However, her greatest impact arguably occurs when she teaches clinically and provides outstanding mentorship and coaching for the medical students, interns, and residents fortunate to be on her teams. Her learner evaluations in these settings are outstanding and it is clear that she serves as an inspiration to those that work with her. She rose to the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, drafting innovative schedules for student rotations and adapting to the demands of virtual learning. She engages in programmatic strategies to improve direct observation of students, provide resident and faculty development in learner assessment, mentor students, and ensure high quality student experiences in their clinical learning environments.
Dr. Freeman has served as a Synthesis Facilitator in the preclinical CIRCLE curriculum for many years, providing frontline instruction in team-based, problem-based learning to early medical students. She is an active member of multiple societies leading innovative, collaborative workshops on a local and national level and contributed to the design a mobile application to provide evidence based medical education tools to providers.
Given her commitment to the advancement of medical education, quality improvement, and patient safety as well as her devotion to our institution, she is a role model to me and many others in our division.