James
Pacala,
MD, MS
Professor and Head, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health
University of Minnesota
Dr. James Pacala is currently a professor and associated head in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. He has performed research and published extensively on models of care delivery to geriatric populations and innovative teaching methods. He is a past president of the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and is co-author of the AGS practice handbook, Geriatrics At Your Fingertips. Dr. Pacala currently chairs the UCare Board of Directors. In 2013, he was appointed to the 2013-14 Health and Aging Policy Fellowship.
Presenting at the Nexus Summit:
In 2018, two educators and a sociologist reflected on the inaugural symposium of the National Collaborative for Improving the Clinical Learning Environment (NCICLE) in an invited commentary in Academic Medicine. During the symposium, leadership noted that optimizing health care and clinical learning environments required improving interprofessional practice. But historically, physicians have not been at the interprofessional table to advance healthcare teams in practice.
The authors drew upon the classical Greek analogy of the Gordian Knot to describe the complex, “wicked”…