Weill Medical College of Cornell University

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General Internal Medicine

Welcome to the Division of General Internal Medicine. Our mission is to maintain and improve the health of our patients, and the overall health of the communities in which our patients live, through a state-of-the-art practice. We are equally dedicated to educating the generalist physicians who will provide this high quality care to the patients we serve. We continue to develop new knowledge, utilizing the sciences of clinical epidemiology, health services research, biostatistics, medical informatics,   health education, and behavioral science.

Our faculty have made outstanding scientific contributions to improving the outcomes of patients with chronic illness. We have developed new methods of measuring clinical phenomena, including disease severity, stability, and function, and combining them in order to predict which patients need more intensive interventions. We also developed the Charlson comorbidity index, which measures the burden of comorbid disease, and is one of the most widely used measures in clinical research. These measures provide a critical framework within which the current costs of care can be evaluated. Furthermore, we have developed methods of preventing complications for hospitalized patients.

The Division has been instrumental in designing new strategies to improve outcomes in patients with cardiovascular disease, specifically those who have undergone revascularization with coronary artery surgery or angioplasty. There have also been successful efforts to develop and refine strategies to assist with cardiovascular disease and cancer, which have resulted in the improvement of a patients’ ability to cope with the disease and to change their lifestyle behaviors accordingly.