Congratulations to Duke AHEAD Steering Committee members Andrew Muzyk, PharmD, and Alison Clay, MD, the recipients of the inaugural Interprofessional Education Awards. Read their full nomination letters below. Congratulations also to all of the nominees of the award: Melinda Blazar, MHS, PA-C, Beth Phillips, PhD, RN, CNE, Meg Carman, DNP, ACNP-BC, ENP-BC, FAEN, Elizabeth Ross, DPT, MMSc, FAACH, Linda Lee, PhD, Poonam Sharma, MD, and Cecily Peterson, MD.
"Andrew thrives on innovation and collaboration. He loves teaching. But he is the kind of teacher who also cares for the individual learner. He is creative in his educational designs and he is rigorous in evaluating outcomes. He is a role model for me."
-Kathryn Andolsek, MD
Dear Award Committee Members,
I am writing to recommend Dr. Andrew Muzyk, for the 1st annual Interprofessional Excellence
Award for professionals with less than five years IPE experience. IPE Award for individuals in
their first five years as a member of the faculty. Andrew, as you know, has been involved with
Duke AHEAD from its inception. He has been an active participant, a grant awardee, and was
nominated to serve a term on the steering committee and the educational research and
innovation subcommittee. Andrew is a terrific example of selfless educational service who
defines interprofessional education. He dedicates himself to enthusiastically cultivating collegial
relationships and energetically teaching with a wide diversity of professions and learners.
Andrew is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice at Campbell
University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences with an adjunct appointment in the
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He is
a core faculty member at Campbell University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
(tenure-track appointment), the Duke University School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry
and Behavioral Sciences, and in the medical school’s newest degree program, the Master of
Biomedical Sciences (MBS).
Our program is a microcosm of all of his multiple accomplishments. He discovered our program
accidentally when he came to our office looking for someone else! He was excited about our
learners and the potential for collaboration. He was recruited by Drs. Elizabeth Ross (PT) and
Joe Jackson (MD-Pediatrics) to be a small group leader in a longitudinal seminar for 8 of our
students. He worked with Drs. Jennifer Carbrey and Matt Velkey (basic science) to deliver iTBL
activities in two of our key courses. He involved our MBS students in a Bass Foundation Grant
he had applied for and won to improve care of patients with opioid addiction and continues to
mentor several of them. He serves on our Admissions Committee.
Clinically, he rounds at Duke as a clinical pharmacist on a medicine-psychiatry treatment team,
improving patient care while teaching pharmacy students, pharmacy residents, psychiatry and
medicine-psychiatry residents, and other interdisciplinary health care professionals. He was
recognized as the Distinguished Young Pharmacist of the Year d in 2012 by the North Carolina
Association of Pharmacist for these clinical activities and precepting. In addition to teaching in
his appointed departments at these two institutions, he lectures to learners enrolled in a
variety of health sciences programs – MD, physician assistant, physical therapy and clinical
research students as well as residents in psychiatry, medicine psychiatry and family medicine.
He is a scholar as well as an educator. He has been the primary investigator on
numerous medication outcomes projects at Duke University Hospital and have mentored a
number of trainees in presentations and scholarly publications, with over 30 peer-reviewed
publications. Several of these are educational studies. In 2012, he won the Association of
Academic Psychiatry’s Educational Program of the Year award for an innovative
psychopharmacology curriculum for the Duke Psychiatry residents that utilized a resident-led
active learning pedagogy. He published the findings from this curriculum in Academic Psychiatry
and from another educational research project, a psychopharmacotherapeutic pharmacy
course that utilized a flipped classroom approach, in Pharmacy Education.
More recently he used a Duke AHEAD grant to partner with several interprofessional colleagues
to develop an innovative substance abuse educational course within the psychiatry clerkship.
The active design of this course created multiple opportunities for students to achieve several
levels of Miller’s Pyramid of Assessments through a combination of learning in the classroom
and doing on the floors. To date, 71 students have participated in this course, and Andrew has
investigated both outcomes and impact. Students’ demonstrated an improvement in their
attitudes toward patients with substance use disorders (SUDs) and toward working
collaboratively with fellow health profession students. Using validated scales, students
demonstrated significant improvement on the domain of teamwork, roles, and responsibilities,
Students placed high value on patient- and community-centered care and respecting patient
diversity. Student narrative comments mirror the course’s core values: developing students’
knowledge base, empathy, communication skills, collaboration, and patient advocacy in SUDs.”
Students practiced patient engagement, explicit skills (motivational interviewing) listening
reflectively, supporting patient autonomy, evoking change talk and reflection. Andrew has
already generated a number of scholarly products from this course. They include the following:
an oral presentation (Six-month interim analysis presented at “Teaching Health Professions
Students MI: Improving Substance Use Curriculum and Student Attitudes toward Substance Use
Disorder.”) Presented at Duke University, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences,
Psychiatry Residency Program Senior Scholarly Lectures, Durham, NC, 06/2016); three poster
presentations ( SUD course design presented at Vanderbilt-Macy conference titled “Graduate
Medical Education (GME) as an Instrument of Change to Improve the Health of Systems,
Populations, and Society.” Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 02/2016; An Interprofessional
Course on Substance Use for Health Professions Students Completing One Month Psychiatry
Clerkship” t Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry (ADMSEP).
Excelsior Spring, MO, 06/2016; “An Interprofessional Course on Substance Use for Health
Professions Students Completing One Month Psychiatry Clerkship” Duke Celebration of
Research, Quality and Innovation in Graduate Medical Education. Duke University SOM,
Durham, NC, 05/2016). In addition, the course design was featured in an AAMC brief report on
medical schools’ response to the opioid epidemic titled “Education future physicians on
substance abuse and pain management and was part of an AAMC presentation on medical schools’ response to
the opioid epidemic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30dm1bJup2E) (6:51 mark)
Most of us would probably be “content” with even a fraction of this productivity. But Andrew
has decided to improve his educator skills even further by enrolling in a masters of health
professions education program at the University of Michigan.
Andrew thrives on innovation and collaboration. He loves teaching. But he the kind of teacher
who also care for the individual learner. He is creative in his educational designs and he is
rigorous in evaluating outcomes. He is a role model for me.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions. I can’t think of another young faculty
member who has accomplished so much, and sets the standard for “excellence.” I can’t wait
for his next 5 years!
Respectfully,
Kathryn Andolsek, MD
"Alison Clay is the consummate candidate for this award because she has a genuine passion for IPE. She looks for every opportunity to develop interprofessional collaboration in her professional life and she shows remarkable respect for all professions. The work she does to bring about the collaboration of different professions seems to genuinely fulfill her and brings tremendous growth to those who work with her. There is no one more deserving of this award than Alison."
-Elizabeth Ross, DPT, MMSc, FAACH
Dear Interprofessional Excellence Award Committee,
This is a letter of the strongest support for the nomination of Alison Clay (MD) to be the first recipient of this prestigious
award. I have known and worked with Alison in many capacities for almost 10 years (since she assumed the role of
Capstone Course Director in the School of Medicine), so I feel well qualified to comment on her worthiness for this
distinction. Dr. Clay has worked tirelessly and persistently for the development and implementation of interprofessional
collaboration in all facets of education, scholarly work and clinical application.
From the onset of her time as leader of Capstone she has striven to provide rich experiences for graduating medical
students with those of other professions. She developed and initiated a long-standing SOM-SON learning experience
simulation for developing a patient treatment plan together, which includes processing of the experience. She recruits and
welcomes those of multiple professions to Capstone who have the expertise (i.e. communication, simulations, etc.) to be
facilitators and educators for these learners. Alison recently developed an interprofessional clinician panel in Capstone to
expose learners to collaboration among professions happening in the clinic. Her designated faculty for Capstone includes
multiple professions such as nursing and physical therapy, along with physicians. Dr. Clay initiated the IPE Passport
concept and gathered together those from nursing, physical therapy, physicians assistant and medical school to develop
this possible format of IPE delivery. Alison is a person of large ideas that are visionary, seeing beyond the present into
what the future could be. She is creative and has the drive to make those designs reality.
I have worked with Alison on multiple research studies and the papers that were published reveaingl the success of
genuine interprofessional collaboration. Her multiple publications show a definite respect for colleagues in professions
other than her own. Dr. Clay has seen to the extensive dissemination of her work through publication and presentation in
multiples journals and conferences.
Dr. Clay has given her heart and soul to the initiation of the IPE Student Clinic that seeks to bring together physicians,
physicians assistants, nurses and physical therapists for the intentional purpose of learning from and with each other while
providing patient care. Despite the challenges of staffing and running this clinic, she has persisted to see it come to
fruition. The benefits to our learners from this experience cannot be fully measured and Dr. Clay has been the torch
bearer for this endeavor.
Alison Clay is the consummate candidate for this award because she has a genuine passion for IPE. She looks for every
opportunity to develop interprofessional collaboration in her professional life and she shows remarkable respect for all
professions. The work she does to bring about the collaboration of different professions seems to genuinely fulfill her and
brings tremendous growth to those who work with her. There is no one more deserving of this award than Alison.
Related members
Alison Clay
Adjunct Associate Professor of the Practice of Medical Education
Andrew Muzyk
Associate Professor of the Practice of Medical Education