Spotlight On: James Hildreth, President & CEO, Meharry Medical College
May 2024 — In an interview with Invest:, James Hildreth, president and CEO of Meharry Medical College, discussed the institution’s competitive enrollment, the launching of the School of Global Health, and the impact of technology on the school’s approach to education and on the doctor-patient relationship.
What does enrollment look like for the college and what is impacting that?
For about a year and a half, I’ve had conversations with my board about the pending decision from The Supreme Court that disallows affirmative action or considering race in the admissions process. Ninety percent of our students are Black, and the other 10% are white, Asian, and some Native American students. Our foundational mission was to make sure people of color had a place to come to both get healed and become healers. Despite the Supreme Court ruling, we have relied on our foundational mission to maintain our focus on what we were created to do. During the pandemic, we saw a massive surge in the number of applications we received for medical school. We normally get about 7,500 applications for 110 seats, which allows us to be very selective in the students we seat for each class. At the height of the pandemic in 2021, we received over 10,000 applications for seats in our class. We have also experienced a similar surge in our school of dentistry, which has 75 seats and consistently receives around 3,000 applications. That year, they got more than 4,000. The Supreme Court ruling caused Black students and Black families to reassess their values and turn their eyes to an institution like ours, which shares the same values. Talented Black students are now applying to HBCUs as opposed to PWIs (predominately white institutions). That means we’ll be drawing students from a different pool than we normally would. In terms of interest in our program and beginning to seat the class, even if our applications were cut in half, we would still see a very competitive class.
What is the latest on the college’s new School of Global Health, which looks to eliminate global health inequities?
We’ve submitted our perspectives to SACSCOC, our accrediting body, and expect the first applicants of the new school will be received starting this fall. It’s the first of its kind in the United States. We decided not to make it a school of global public health because achieving health equity means bringing teams together across disciplines. We need public health officials, health policy experts, social workers, politicians, data science, and artificial intelligence. Having a School of Global Health allows us to recruit faculty members from all those domains and disciplines. If it were a school for public health, the accreditation of SACSCOC wouldn’t allow for this cross-disciplinary approach that we are taking. A truly cross-disciplinary approach will better prepare our students to be sent into the world and understand how important collaborations are.
What is the impact of technology on the school’s approach to education?
Technology will have an unbelievable impact on everything we do, especially artificial intelligence. People think it’s something that’s coming, but it’s already happening. Artificial intelligence is going to be important in everything we do every day. We want to ensure that we expose our students to technology’s strengths, weaknesses, and dangers. When you go to a physician, they might spend 13-15 minutes with you at most, and some of them have an iPad with boxes to be checked. Now, imagine we get to a point where artificial intelligence or bots are doing the patient’s history and physical, and the physicians are spending even less time with the patient. We have to protect against that. The best outcome in medicine happens when the patient trusts the judgment of the physicians and that the physicians care about their patient’s well-being. Technology could potentially hurt this relationship. While technology has great potential, maintaining the connection between the human physician and human patient could be jeopardized if we do not create standards and processes for how we allow technology to aid the healthcare experience.
Studies have shown that when the profile of physicians matches that of the patients they care for, the outcomes are better. Creating diverse provider teams allows patients to see they’re represented in a team that cares for them. If technology and AI start to create more barriers in diversifying a patient’s healthcare delivery experience, it won’t be a good thing. We’re trying to find ways to make sure our students are aware of all these things and that they consider these things as they start their careers.
What exciting developments are in the pipeline for Meharry Medical College?
Last October, we launched a historic partnership with four large pharmaceutical companies: Roche, Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, and the Regeneron Genetics Center. The first human genome was fully sequenced in 2003. It took thousands of scientists, costing about $2 billion. We’ve reached the point that in 2024, for $800 and in about three hours, we can fully sequence a human genome. Thousands of genomes have been sequenced, but only about 1.3% of them come from people of African ancestry. Genetic sequences will be the basis for discovering new drugs and interventions and, more importantly, preventing disease before it happens. The potential of this newly found genomic data set is that it can be a valuable tool in solving diseases and creating medical interventions for any of the current 7,000 diseases based on genetic mutations that have no cure. The addition of African American genomes could lead to interventions and drug developments that will benefit people of all ancestry. Our partnership with these four drug companies aims to recruit 500,000 people of African ancestry and sequence their genomes to begin building this unique data set. All the data collected will be available to researchers at HBCUs so that these institutions and students can lead these discoveries that will have a lasting impact on so many people who look like them.
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