Dean’s Message

As we enter 2021, it continues to be an unprecedented time for the OU College of Medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these past several months have also featured great strides and accomplishments. This issue of the magazine offers an in-depth look at our activities.

COVID-19 has, of course, changed the way we educate our students and care for our patients. After pausing their in-person clinical clerkships for a period of time in the spring, our medical students returned to their rotations by summer. Many of our faculty members, particularly in the Department of Pathology, undertook the herculean effort of deploying several tests for COVID-19. They also created a new test, in collaboration with colleagues at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, that avoids many of the supply chain issues that have plagued other laboratories. This magazine also features stories about some of our research efforts surrounding COVID-19, as well as a program to train nursing home personnel to keep their residents safe and engaged during the pandemic. That effort utilizes our extensive network of relationships with healthcare providers across rural Oklahoma.

Our healthcare enterprise as a whole has made major strides over the past several months. The OU College of Medicine, like all colleges within the OU Health Sciences Center, is working closer than ever with our hospital partner, OU Medicine, Inc. In the fall, our enterprise announced the new brand identity OU Health, which represents the combined efforts of OU Medicine, Inc., and the OU Health Sciences Center. The identity came after months of analysis and extensive feedback from Oklahomans across the state, whose needs encompass medicine and many other healthcare services.

In the fall, we opened the new patient tower at the OU Health University of Oklahoma Medical Center. The North Tower, as it is called, is connected to the existing hospital on the southeast corner of 13th Street and Lincoln. It features 144 additional beds, 32 operating rooms, and was also designed with our educational mission in mind, featuring simulation rooms and additional meeting space for our students and residents.

In this issue of the magazine, we’ll also tell you about many other successes – the first patient at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital OU Health to be treated with CAR-T, an immune therapy that is changing the way we treat blood cancers; our faculty members’ participation in an international clinical trial that led to a new drug for metastatic prostate cancer; and a record-breaking year for research grants, both for the college as a whole and for several individual departments.

This is a unique time in our history to be in academic medicine. The COVID-19 pandemic has been challenging, and often fatiguing, for our dedicated healthcare providers as they use all the tools at their disposal to help patients who are fighting for their lives. Our students and residents face unforeseen hurdles to training and preparing for their future. But everyone who is part of the OU College of Medicine, indeed our entire academic healthcare system, has risen to the occasion day after day. I am proud to serve with them as we work toward improving the health and well-being of all Oklahomans.

John P. Zubialde, M.D. Executive Dean, OU College of Medicine