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Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Future doctors design solutions to health care challenges in a groundbreaking program.

By TCU Magazine

August 10^th, 2023

By Lisa Martin

On an October morning, the 60 first-year medical students at TCU’s Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine gathered, but not to dissect cadavers, practice patient interactions or wrestle with complex diseases.

Instead, small groups presented the creative, technology-based health care solutions they had spent a week designing. Teams worked to address childhood obesity, diabetes, athletic injury and more by using apps, telehealth and other tech-supported innovations. The goal of the week was to inspire the students to harness technology to improve health outcomes for their patients.

Welcome to Future Accelerators of Medicine and Beyond.

Dr. Stuart D. Flynn, founding dean of the medical school, introduced FAB Week to the first class of medical students in 2019. A former professor of pathology and surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and founding dean of the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, Flynn wove innovation into the TCU medical school’s curriculum.

“Medical knowledge is doubling every 70 days,” he said. “By the time you get to the target, it’s past you. The science is moving at lightning speed, doubling five times just in a medical student’s first year in school.

“Looking over the horizon to a decade or longer will be critical to their careers and critical to improving outcomes for patients,” Flynn said. He believes no other U.S. medical school has created a program like Future Accelerators of Medicine and Beyond, which is aimed at first-year medical students. He tapped the expertise of area business and health care leaders, as well as innovators at TCU’s Neeley School of Business.

During her first FAB Week, Lauren Hui, now in her second year of medical school, worked on a project that her group dubbed PT Ninja, an app intended to gamify physical therapy. Her team’s proposal included an interactive component wherein patients would take video of themselves doing their prescribed exercises, which they could share with health care providers.

“It was our way of trying to get patients more involved in their own care and motivating them at the same time,” the aspiring surgeon said. “Anyone who has done physical therapy knows it can get repetitive and boring over time.”

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Inquiring Minds

Encouraging out-of-the-box thinking among her students has become a specialty of Stacy Landreth Grau, associate professor of medical education and the associate dean of the John V. Roach Honors College, who focuses on innovation and design thinking.

Grau, along with Cedric James ’13 (MEd ’20), director of student engagement at the Institute of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, created the human-centered Design Week, one of the four FAB Weeks in 2022.

Design thinking involves framing and scoping a problem to solve, researching that problem, testing a range of hypotheses and, finally, developing prototypes.

“Design thinking is so useful because it’s all based on the user,” Grau said. “I’m here to help the students identify problems from a human-centered perspective and provide tools and mindsets to develop really impactful and creative solutions.”

Her collaboration with the medical school focuses on giving the students the tools they need to view a community as a system and determine health care’s role within that.

“A friend and I were talking about how cancer diagnosis needs a redesign,” Grau said. “As a patient you have all these different tests and treatments, which are already pretty cumbersome. Then you overlay the complete and utter devastation of that first diagnosis. It’s a hard system to navigate.”

For the FAB Week in October 2022, Grau and James asked students to re-imagine how technology is used in medicine. Groups considered everyone from children and pregnant women to adults over 70 and people struggling with chronic illness.

Winston Scambler, now in his second year at Burnett, worked with five fellow medical students to design an interactive mirror to help injured adults. The mirror would enable users to livestream sessions with a physical therapist with the goal of increasing compliance and making sure the patient does the exercises correctly, thereby decreasing the risk of re-injury.

While the week proved a big departure from typical academics or simulated patient care sessions, Scambler said he found it valuable in part because of the interactions with his cohort.

As a physician, you have to be able to be a servant leader in a lot of ways,” he said. “[In] medicine you may bump heads from time to time, but you need to get along and you need to be professional, which is what something like FAB Week teaches.”

As a child, Steve Miff sometimes accompanied his physician father on house calls. To this day, the president and CEO of Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation in Dallas admires the way his dad knew key details about his patients’ lives, such as when someone planned to marry or when they’d lost a job. Caring, context and connection made him a better physician, Miff said.

Those experiences motivated Miff to focus on helping vulnerable patient populations. At the behest of Flynn, he has introduced TCU’s medical students to predictive modeling. The independent nonprofit that he runs, which is affiliated with the Parkland Health and Hospital System, employs advanced analytics, data science and social determinants to help patients receive the best possible care.

For instance, Miff’s company compiled data on more than a million patients and linked socioeconomic data to patient clinical records. One key cohort was a group of 50,000 patients with both diabetes and hypertension who also have some of the highest utilization of mental health behavioral services in and around Dallas.

“If you enroll them in a diabetes-focused program, you might be addressing only one of the multiple things they are dealing with,” Miff said. Health care providers become used to treating problems sequentially, but that becomes a less effective strategy when, say, patients miss appointments because they struggle with issues like transportation or taking time off work.

The physician of tomorrow must find innovative ways around the obstacles that make it hard for patients to get treatment, which in turn can improve their patients’ quality of life.

In terms of diabetes treatment, that could mean leaning into telemedicine for checkups or having patients send in glucose readings to reduce office visits.

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Group Effort

During FAB Weeks — there are four during the first year of medical education — students delve into health care-related issues as varied as genomics, biowearables and artificial intelligence.

Discussions of advances in medicine dovetail with much of what the medical students learn starting in their first year. Quinn Losefsky ’19 (MD ’23) recalled a seminal experience early in her medical school education when she and her classmates did genetic testing on their cadavers.

“Our cadaver was in his 50s and had died of a drug overdose, and it turned out that he had a gene that altered his use of opioids,” she said. “This enzyme he had meant he metabolized the drug more slowly.”

Genomics — the sequencing of someone’s DNA — has led to the emerging field of pharmacogenomics, in which drug therapies are tailored to an individual body’s response to medicine.

“If we know you have a certain gene that hypermetabolizes a drug, we give you a bigger dose,” Flynn said. “If you metabolize a drug slower than normal, you run the risk of overdosing if given a typical dose.”

Flynn said he anticipates that health care systems will soon sequence all patients to enable physicians to adjust dosages accordingly, among addressing a wealth of other health-related issues.

“I’m much more likely to incorporate genetic testing into my practice because I learned something about it from FAB Week,” said Losefsky, a general surgery resident at the University of Louisville.

In addition to keeping up with emerging science, effective doctors also communicate with and relate to their patients, something the Burnett School of Medicine has emphasized since Day One.

Big data can enhance doctors’ understanding of the communities they serve, making them better equipped to take care of those populations.

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Swimming with Sharks

For the final FAB Week, teams of students pitch ideas for products as part of a competition based on the popular reality TV show Shark Tank. Judges from business and academia vote on the best concept.

Floyd Wormley Jr., associate provost for research and dean of graduate studies at TCU, served on the panel when the Class of 2025 went head-to-head. Students had to come up with an idea and work with their team and adviser to create a product. They also had to consider funding sources. Would their product appeal to venture capitalists or be in the running for federal grants?

“You can make a great scientific discovery,” Flynn said, “but it won’t matter if industry can’t understand or doesn’t see scalable value to what you’re doing or if it is going to lose money.”

“Some of these students will go on to be entrepreneurs in health care spaces,” said Wormley, who was particularly impressed with a project that used smartphones to detect melanomas, a deadly type of skin cancer.

“I was impressed with how much the students seemed to appreciate the chance to explore different ways of problem-solving and thinking,” Wormley said. Other past projects have included a nanoparticle monitor that circulated in the bloodstream; if, say, a renal function chemical spiked, an alarm would go off, alerting health care professionals that something was wrong with the patient’s kidneys.

Flynn said he sees the program as a vital way the Burnett School of Medicine is preparing the next generation of physician leaders.

“The FAB Weeks aren’t just about science,” he said. “We put ethics into every one of these and look at the impact on diversity and underrepresented populations with the idea that these kinds of experiences will impact the kind of physicians they can become.

“FAB drives our students to be inquisitive,” Flynn said, “maturing them to be leaders in the future of medicine.”

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

Imagining Medical Breakthroughs

© 2026 TCU Magazine

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