Roland “Red”Hiss

In 1927, the U-M’s Department of Postgraduate Medicine, under the leadership of Professor James Bruce, became the first department in the nation to provide education to health professionals beyond medical and graduate school degrees. After several name changes, continuing progress, and significant growth in staff and resources, what is now called the Department of Medical Education continues to offer professional education to physicians through programs that are nationally recognized models in the field.

Last year marked the 75th anniversary of this department, which has set major trends in continuing medical education and medical education research both within the U-M Health System and at hospitals across Michigan — trends which have influenced teaching hospitals and medical schools throughout the U.S.

Before the late 1960s, Medical Education was merely a 30-seat classroom and three small offices for the administrative staff and a faculty of about 10 physicians with partial appointments to the department. In 1969, the Towsley Center building not only gave the department a home, but further established it as a formalized center for medical education. In the mid 1970s, the department officially became involved in undergraduate medical education at the U-M and created the Office of Educational Resources and Research, which provided the department its first full-time faculty —Ph.D.s who specialized in education and other behavioral and social sciences.

In addition to the department’s 75th anniversary, 2002 also marked the twentieth year that Roland “Red” Hiss (M.D. 1957, Residency 1964, Fellowship 1966) has served as its chair. Hiss has not only been synonymous with medical education at Michigan, he has hardly parted from the

U-M in general since his undergraduate years. He began pursuing his bachelor’s degree at the University in 1950, went into the Medical School immediately afterward, then strayed from Michigan for just four years to pursue a rotating internship at Philadelphia General Hospital and serve as a flight surgeon at the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio, Texas. Hiss returned to the U-M in 1961 for his internal medicine residency and a fellowship in hematology.

Red, as his many colleagues and coworkers call him, joined the Medical School faculty in 1966. He has taught hematology and other subjects to an estimated 8,000 medical students. Says Hiss, “The collective experience of teaching so many students at this school is probably the part I liked most about my career and felt that I had the most impact in.”

Hiss’s influence on medical education has extended outside of the U-M as well. He was one of the key developers of the Michigan Diabetes Research and Training Center, an organization that supports biomedical research in diabetes and promotes widespread adoption of research discoveries into health care at the community level. Hiss has acted as the director of the Center’s Prevention and Control Division since 1977.

In June of this year, after more than two decades as chair of the Department of Medical Education and 37 years on the faculty, Hiss will retire. Although he won’t be directly spreading his extraordinary range of medical knowledge to students and faculty at the Medical School, his legacy and distinctive teaching philosophy will continue.

“If there’s any kind of theme to my career in medical education, it is the continuous education of practicing physicians at their worksites. Traditional continuing education has its place, but the real learning that everybody experiences — physicians and others alike — is when they have a problem in the clinical setting, and they need help solving it. This is the ‘teachable moment.’”

—RS

Also:

Focusing on Leadership

Medical Education Day 2003

A Long and Illustrious History of Leading the Way

Changing of the Guard