Tom DeWitt, MD, to Step Down From Director Role
Tom DeWitt, MD, Carl Weihl Professor of Pediatrics and director, General and Community Pediatrics, will step down as division director within the year. He will remain as a faculty member and focus more on his medical education roles here.
DeWitt has been a mainstay at Cincinnati Children’s since 1995. A graduate of Amherst College and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, he completed his residency and chief residency in pediatrics at Yale/New Haven Hospital in 1980 and his fellowship in general academic pediatrics as a Robert Wood Johnson fellow, Yale University School of Medicine in 1982. After holding an initial faculty position at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, he came to Cincinnati Children’s as the Carl Weihl Professor and director of General and Community Pediatrics, a division created by the merging of Ambulatory Pediatrics and Community Pediatrics.
DeWitt currently serves as the associate chair for Education, the designated institutional official and chair of the Graduate Medical Education Committee. He recently completed two years as president of the medical staff.
Nationally, he has been president of the Academic Pediatric Association, and chair of both the American Academy of Pediatrics Steering Committee of the Pediatric Research in Office Settings (PROS) network and the Committee on Pediatric Education. DeWitt was also a member of the United States Preventative Services Task Force, chairing their methodology workgroup and both the ACGME Transition Year and Pediatric Residency Review Committees. He is currently the chair of the Reach Out and Read National Advisory Board. With over 100 publications, he is internationally known as an expert in the areas of faculty development and community-based education and research.
As director, he initially structured the division with four sections – clinical, education, research, and community pediatrics. Growth of the division has been remarkable – from 17 physicians to more than 50, and from 14,000 visits at one site in FY 1996 to almost 90,000 visits in FY 2015. The division cares for a predominantly underserved population. Its clinical expansion now includes primary care in four sites, complex care (its own section), breast-feeding medicine, foster care, environmental health, and school-based health centers in three schools.
Quality improvement endeavors in many of these settings have earned national recognition for patient outcomes and decreased overall healthcare costs. DeWitt initiated a hospital medicine service in the late 1990s that ultimately became the Division of Hospital Medicine. Building on his experience at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, he implemented a multi-tiered educator development program that culminated in the first fully online Certificate and Masters in Medical Education, leading to a national reputation for leadership in medical education research.
He developed a community primary care experience for residents that includes time in community settings. This approach instills an appreciation for the community pediatrician’s perspective on healthcare.
Since the late 1990s, the research section of the division has had consistent NIH funding and a continually funded NRSA fellowship program. Initially focused on the antecedents of adult disease and environmental issues, the research section is now increasingly focused on community and population health issues, such as social determinants of health, asthma, obesity, and toxin exposures. DeWitt also started a community practice-based research group in the late 1990s that has now been incorporated into the CTSA community-based research group.
Recently, through a rigorous strategic planning process, the division has developed a more comprehensive focus and trajectory on community health with increasing alignment to the core vision of providing exceptional health for every child, together with the larger community responsible for all aspects of child health. This trajectory provides a major opportunity to be the leader in field of pediatric community and population health.
DeWitt will remain division director until the arrival of his successor. As chair of the search committee, Lori Stark, PhD, is committed to finding a leader to match his breadth and depth of experience. Assisting her are Drs. Andy Beck, Chris Bolling, Maria Britto, Ernie Ciambarella, Catherine Gordon, Camille Graham, Srikant Iyer, Rob Kahn, Carolyn Kercsmar, Mona Mansour and Ndidi Unaka.
