Basma Mohamed, MBChB, has received a Faculty Enhancement Opportunity (FEO) grant to complete a yearlong Perioperative Medicine Fellowship at Duke University.
Dr. Mohamed, an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology, will complete the fellowship remotely while at UF. The FEO award will cover the full $45,000 tuition for the fellowship, which begins in August and is a collaboration between Duke Anesthesiology and the University College of London.
Dr. Mohamed’s goal is to improve her understanding of the impact of population health on perioperative outcomes and gain skills in data science and clinical research to provide value-based care to surgical patients.
“One of the things I’m most excited to learn is how to advance our patient-centered outcome research at our perioperative medicine division though data management, artificial intelligence, and clinical research,” she said. “I hope the fellowship will be the start to expand these aspects for many surgical services.”
Perioperative medicine involves optimizing all phases of patient care, from preoperative and intraoperative to postoperative. The specialty is a seen as an increasingly important way to improve patient outcomes by enabling healthcare providers to analyze the full picture of a patient’s experience from the time surgery is discussed to full recovery, Dr. Mohamed said.
After learning Duke’s techniques and strategies for perioperative medicine, Dr. Mohamed hopes to expand the practice at UF Health. She has been involved in perioperative services on a small scale for neurosurgical patients through the UF Health Comprehensive Spine Center, and she hopes to apply the concept to other surgical services.
“We have a Presurgical Center here to optimize patients and we perform a lot of interventions to optimize patients’ comorbidities, but there’s no way for us to easily evaluate the outcome data to see if the preoperative intervention improved the outcome,” she said. “I’m hoping we can expand this to standardizing postoperative co-management.”
Her goal over the next 5 years is to expand the Department of Anesthesiology collaboration with Internal Medicine specialties, other healthcare professionals (such as physical therapy, nutrition services, nursing, and pharmacy), and Information Technology to develop a Comprehensive Perioperative Medicine center at UF Health.
“Instead of working in silos, we work together as a team and we co-manage with the surgical team and other healthcare professionals to enhance patients’ recovery and provide value-based care,” Dr. Mohamed said.
Duke is highly regarded in the field and has pioneered Enhanced Recovery After Surgery implementation in the United States, which is an evidence-based approach to improve surgical patient recovery. The perioperative fellowship curriculum includes training in point-of-care ultrasound as well as business administrative skills, outcome research, and postoperative management.
UF awards FEO awards for “creative and flexible faculty development activities.” Awards are intended to contribute to the professional career goals of individual faculty members and the goals of the university overall.
“I was planning to go for the fellowship, but to be able to be supported during that time is really amazing,” Dr. Mohamed said of her award.