University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center College of Medicine (Oklahoma City, OK) was founded in 1900, ten years after the creation of the University of Oklahoma (OU). In 1910, the medical college merged with the Epworth College of Medicine to form the state’s only allopathic medical school, a distinction that OU proudly maintains to this day. The College of Medicine is the largest component of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center system. Originally, the College of Medicine was housed on the Oklahoma City campus, but was expanded to include a Tulsa campus in 1972. Twenty-two percent of the third- and fourth-year OU students electively take their clinical education and training in Tulsa. The Tulsa campus enables OU to use community hospital training facilities and OU Clinics to establish additional medical residencies and to provide for expanded health-care capabilities in the state.

In order to take full advantage of the rapidly developing field of medical genomics, the current Medical School curriculum will be modified to now include more comprehensive training in collecting family health histories and to incorporate Genetic Alliance’s Does it Run in the Family? toolkit. In this program, the booklets are intended not as a training tool for medical students, but as an educational resource for their future patients. The OU College of Medicine will use the GA’s customizable FHH tools to modify the FHH booklets and incorporate them into the new systems-based curriculum.

The OU College of Medicine is currently developing a new systems-based curriculum for the basic science years of medical school. This new curriculum will be finalized and offered to students in the fall of 2010, a year following the proposed project. In this new program, the current curricula will be integrated into a new course: Patients, Physicians, and Society. This course will include interviewing and communication skills and physical examination skills, as well as the integration of content previously taught in the Human Behavior Course. This new course will allow the incorporation of new teaching methods and the enhancement of current teaching methods. Clinical geneticists and genetic counselors familiar with the current curriculum believe that students are not sufficiently exposed to, nor are they trained to obtain, FHH data in such a way as to take advantage of recent advances in clinical genomics. Consequently, the development and integration of an enhanced teaching program for obtaining a medical family history with more extensive focus on inheritable diseases is likely to benefit the current course and the education of medical students.

The OU College of Medicine will incorporate the Does it Run in the Family? toolkit into their medical school curricula by:

• Convening a family health history advisory committee
• Modifying the Genetic Alliance Family Health History Tool using the online tool
• Educating and training medical school faculty by having them complete their own health histories.
• Disseminating the toolkit to first-year med students

It is the goal of the project to integrate the Does it Run in the Family? toolkit fully into the OU medical school curriculum, as well as formalize the family health history program with the hopes of expanding it to other Heartland Regional Genetics and Newborn Screening Collaborative medical programs.