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Meet Yale Internal Medicine: Lauren Ferrante, MD, MHS, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine).

March 02, 2020

As part of our “Meet Yale Internal Medicine” series, today’s featured physician is Lauren Ferrante, MD, MHS, assistant professor of medicine (pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine).

Lauren Ferrante, MD, MHS, admits it is cliché, but she’s always been drawn to helping people.

She loved school, but was also a talented dancer, so Ferrante had to make a decision early on to pursue higher education or a career in dance. Her mother, Magda, an immigrant from Bolivia, ingrained the value of education in her daughter at a young age, an opportunity that was lacking in her home country. The desire to help people and love of education led Ferrante to pursue a career in medicine.

Dr. Lauren Ferrante

In medical school, Ferrante enjoyed everything she was doing so she decided to pursue internal medicine. She loved being able to apply the same critical thinking skills to her studies that led her into medicine in the first place.

“I like the complexity of internal medicine,” explained Ferrante. “And when thinking about the specialties of Internal Medicine, I think there are some unifying features that draw people into critical care medicine. In the ICU [intensive care unit], you're helping people through some of the most difficult and intense experiences of their lives. To be able to hold their hand while also addressing the complexity of multi-organ failure in the ICU is a unique opportunity.”

Ferrante was also interested in the ethical issues that can arise in the ICU, along with understanding patient outcomes after they leave the unit.

“When I was an internal medicine resident and pursuing fellowship, the post-ICU outcomes literature was really exploding. There were some landmark papers published in high impact journals that fascinated me,” she said. “I wanted to explore whether older adults were more vulnerable to these poor outcomes. When considering a research career, it’s a good sign if you're reading articles in your spare time and want to keep reading to look for knowledge gaps.”

Ferrante was ready to leave Manhattan for a new experience, and was impressed by what she saw at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and within the Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine (Yale-PCCSM). She and her husband knew they wanted to start a family in the future, and when Ferrante visited Yale-PCCSM for her fellowship interview, something struck her as a unique aspect of the program that she hadn’t seen at other places.

“I remember the first slide they put up on interview day was that of the welcome picnic. This set the tone for my perceptions of Yale and of this section,” said Ferrante. “Yale has top-tier research, education, and clinical care, and offers outstanding training and collaborative opportunities, but also values family and collegiality. Thankfully, what I perceived to be true on my interview day was actually true when I came here. I was really struck by the friendly and collaborative environment in both the ICU and the section.”

When Ferrante had her daughter during the second year of fellowship, and her son during her first faculty year, she felt supported within the section, which she admits is probably not true of every institution. “At Yale, there is an expectation of professionalism, and of being kind and supportive of your colleagues, which is so important for well-being,” she said.

Ferrante joined the YSM faculty in 2015 and continued her work on functional outcomes of older ICU patients. She is a strong advocate of integrating geriatrics principles into critical care medicine and increasing collaboration between the subspecialties and geriatrics. She partnered with mentors in both pulmonary (Margaret Pisani, MD, MPH) and geriatrics (Thomas Gill, MD) and while she is not the only one working across multiple areas, she admits it is still ‘fairly unique to merge two fields’ as she has.

She has been an advocate for this line of work, co-authoring an opinion piece in Annals of the American Thoracic Society, urging physicians to invest “time, talent and resources to optimize care and change practice patterns to address the needs of our most complex and vulnerable patients.” Read “Integrating Geriatric Principles into Critical Care Medicine: The Time Is Now.”

In their research, Ferrante and team have shown that for older adults, their pre-ICU functional trajectory is an important determinant of outcomes after discharge. The group has also studied vulnerability factors among older adults, such as frailty, that are critically important for post-ICU functional outcomes.

In February 2020, her mentee Jason Falvey, PT, DPT, PhD, presented their findings at the Society of Critical Care Medicine 49th Critical Care Congress regarding home health rehabilitation for Medicare patients after leaving the ICU, the first study of its kind. They found care gaps that can make some patients more vulnerable than others and must be addressed.

In addition, Ferrante has published on the work-life aspects of medicine. She and her husband, Michael Dorfman, MD, juggle a two-physician household, which she shared insights into through her May 2019 JAMA article, “Dual-Physician Households: Strategies for the 21st Century.” Ferrante and her co-author Lona Mody, MD, MSc, discuss personal and professional challenges and strategies for dual physician households and urge their colleagues in similar situations to “develop effective strategies to address [these] challenges.” Ferrante also feels strongly about equity, diversity, and inclusion within medicine, and is part of the Diversity Committee within the Department of Internal Medicine.

Since joining the faculty, Ferrante’s work has been funded by several grants, including a Paul B. Beeson Emerging Leaders in Aging Career Development Award from the NIH. She’s won awards for her research, including the 2016 Department of Internal Medicine’s Iva Dostanic, MD, PhD, Physician-Scientist Trainee Award, the 2018 ANZICS Global Rising Star award, and inaugural Arti Hurria Memorial Award for Emerging Investigators in Internal Medicine from the American Geriatrics Society in 2019.

Ferrante was also recently named as director of the Operations Core at the Yale Pepper Older Americans Independence Center.

For Ferrante, it all goes back to why she entered medicine in the first place, a desire to help.

“I really love what I do. I feel so fortunate to have this diversity of practice where I get to answer really interesting questions, design thought-provoking studies, and help people,” said Ferrante. “I'm excited about the future.”

The Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine is one of the eleven sections within YSM’s Department of Internal Medicine. To learn more about Yale-PCCSM, visit PCCSM’s website, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.