James L. Holly, M.D., and his wife recently funded The Dr. and Mrs. James L. Holly Distinguished Professorship at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA). This $250,000 endowment will be a permanent fixture for the benefit of UTHSCSA.
Funds distributed from the endowment will be used to support and promote a model of patient-centered primary care and education. The Distinguished Professorship also will promote interdepartmental and interdisciplinary education, collaboration, and practice-model development between Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, Pediatrics, and the School of Nursing’s advanced practice programs. As future gifts are received by UTHSCSA for this endowment, it is the donors’ intent that the endowment title and purpose be redesignated to the highest level for which it qualifies.
“My wife and I thought that the best way to institutionalize [the patient-centered medical home concept] was to endow a distinguished professorship, and eventually when we’re able to add other funds to that, a chair of patient-centered medical home that’s interdepartmental and interdisciplinary, where students are being trained, not only physically, but emotionally and intellectually and even spiritually,” Holly says.
Holly says that this endowment will help ingrain the patient-centered medical home concept into medical students’ training, so it can color the next generation of clinicians. He notes that healthcare data is so siloed today, that training is needed for the next generation of medical students to find ways to break down the barriers that separate patients’ access to care and their data.
