As part of our “Meet Yale Internal Medicine” series, today’s featured faculty is Jennifer Ouellet, MD, assistant professor of medicine (geriatrics).
Q: What led you into medicine as a career?
A: I have always been drawn to both scientific principles and a desire to help others. I think a career in medicine was the perfect way for me to fulfill both of these things. I enjoy making connections with people, making relationships and building on them over time. I like to meet people, find out what's important to them, what matters to them, and then help them achieve that through their healthcare.
Q: Why specialize in geriatrics?
A: I’ve had an interest in geriatrics going back many years. I volunteered at nursing homes growing up, and really I liked spending time with older adults, connecting with them and hearing their stories. During training, I realized how often we see complications of multiple chronic conditions in our older patients. Interactions between medications are common and we often don’t know the best treatment course. One of the unique things about geriatrics is the ability to sift through the complexity and help people achieve what outcomes matters to them, not just what matters to us as clinicians.
Q: What brought you to Yale?
A: My husband [Gregory Ouellet, MD, MHS] and I matched here together for Internal Medicine residency. We were looking for a program that had a collegial environment and also stressed the importance of academic rigor, being science- and evidence-based. We've really found that here at Yale. On our interview day for residency, we met smart, dedicated, and caring faculty and residents. In addition to working with outstanding clinicians, you get to be in an environment where you are pushed to reach your academic potential. This environment, along with the unparalleled mentorship that we've gotten here, has been what has kept us here.
I did a year of clinical fellowship in Geriatrics, followed by an advanced fellowship year in clinician education. This additional year of training really helped me to build the skills I need to achieve my long term career goal of creating, delivering and evaluating the impact of innovative education about the care of older adults for health professional trainees.
Q: Tell me about your research. What are you working on?
A: My research and scholarship has been inspired by the need to provide all health professional trainees the knowledge and skills necessary to care for the aging population. Older adults have unique healthcare needs, and we can’t meet those needs with the current Geriatrics workforce. So thinking about that as a big picture problem, what can we do to address it? The strategy I have adopted is developing education curricula for multiple populations of learners (i.e., medical students, residents, nursing students, physician associate students, practicing clinicians). Through mentorship and coursework in educational scholarship, I have worked to study the impact of these curricula and scale them for wider dissemination.
Working with Dr. Mary Tinetti, our section chief, I have focused substantial attention an approach to tailoring clinical decision-making to patients’ own priorities, called Patient Priorities Care. My main research in this area has been educational scholarship, i.e. evaluating how well we can teach this approach to various clinical audiences and whether it results in practice change. This year, for example, I collaborated on developing a multisite training on the PPC approach for Geriatrics fellows, and I hope to adapt this to Internal Medicine residents soon.
Q: You mentioned your passion for education. What is your work in this area?
A: My overall career goal is to marry my clinical, education and research interests and to study the impact of education innovations focusing on the care of older adults. In addition to this being my main scholarship interest, I have found fulfillment in directly teaching health professional trainees. In reflecting on the pivotal moments in my training, many included interactions with educators who inspired me to learn and pushed me to be my best. I strive to do the same every day for those that I teach. During my time as an advanced geriatric medicine fellow, I developed an outpatient curriculum for Internal Medicine residents and have been working to formalize the curriculum for our inpatient rotation as well. I’ve also collaborated with other faculty members to provide education in Geriatrics to other clinical audiences including medical, advanced practice nursing and physician associate students.
Q: What are your career goals?
A: My overall career goal is to improve the care of older adults through the development and evaluation of education innovations grounded in the evidence based principles of Geriatrics. Over the next 5 or 10 years, I envision developing skills in scaling impact and dissemination of curricula focused on helping clinicians provide care that aligns with what matters most to individual patients.
Yale’s Section of Geriatrics strives to improve the health of older adults by providing exceptional patient care, training future leaders and innovators in aging, and engaging in cutting-edge research. To learn more about their mission, visit Geriatrics.