Grantee Spotlight: Q&A on Medical Education in East Central Indiana

Associate Dean Derron Bishop
IU School of Medicine-Muncie

For the past eight years, local healthcare providers and colleges/universities have been working together to build East Central Indiana’s reputation as a statewide leader in medical education. The region’s medical school, largest hospitals, rural clinics, urban neighborhood centers, nursing schools, and others are reimagining healthcare training in ways that have the potential to change the future of healthcare delivery. The need is critical—shortages of healthcare workers abound and the prevalence of chronic diseases has risen to unprecedented levels in urban and rural areas alike. 

With a focus on recruiting “homegrown talent,” providing innovative training experiences, placing an emphasis on healthy lifestyles and disease prevention, and overall excellence in the provision of medical education, East Central Indiana is making its mark. As of 2024, Ball Brothers Foundation has committed over $2.5 million to efforts designed to reimagine medical education while improving community health through an effort we call “Optimus Primary.” 

Check out our latest Q&A with the Associate Dean of the IU School of Medicine-Muncie to learn more:

Derron Bishop, Associate Dean of the IU School of Medicine-Muncie, has been a leader in these efforts since the start.

• Can you tell us a little more about what makes the IU School of Medicine-Muncie campus so special?

  The Indiana University School of Medicine-Muncie (IUSM-Muncie) stands out for its 52-year presence in the community, exclusively training medical students from IU School of Medicine. Despite being the 14th most populous county in the state, Muncie is home to the oldest and second largest physician training program in the state outside of Marion County (Indianapolis). The IUSM-Muncie is situated at IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital, close to Ball State University and Meridian Health Services, offering a unique community-based environment. The collective expertise and collaborative efforts between the anchor institutions and hospital work to improve community health outcomes.

• Eight years ago, you approached BBF along with Dr. Jeff Bird (IU Health East Central Region) and Dr. Jay Hess (IU School of Medicine). What were your concerns then?

  At the time, I had taken on a leadership role on the campus and we recognized we weren’t utilizing our unique community assets to our full advantage. With Ball Brothers Foundation, we sketched out what barriers were holding us back and the basic tenets of the Optimus Primary emerged: improved housing, interprofessional training, specialty training, and facility improvements.

  From there, we started training students introducing modifiable lifestyle choices into healthcare and new ways to bond interprofessional teams. This training model has been influential to many health care systems as they begin to consider aspects of Optimus Primary as part of their broader mission and vision.

• In the time since, what have been some of the “biggest wins”?

  Here is the great thing about the last eight years of Optimus Primary: while we certainly have big wins, we also have a lot of big win-wins.

  The Maplewood Mansion project

  We were faced with a housing problem for medical students who temporarily train here in Muncie. When a Ball Corporation spin-off vacated Maplewood Mansion, we worked with Ball Brothers Foundation and BSU’s Residential Property Management faculty and students to use the Mansion to house temporary medical students with BSU students managing the property. This win-win resulted in “the best medical student housing in the country” according to a recent publication and a real-world training site for the students.

  Healthy Lifestyle Center

  In partnership with BSU, we’re working to train physicians in interprofessional teams where members work as equals in a dynamic environment to deliver high quality patient care. Teams, including students from BSU College of Health and IUSM-Muncie medical students, provide free services to help clients in improving their health by modifying lifestyle factors. This free clinic is unique in the state, offering comprehensive interprofessional care and training.

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• Tell us a little more about your interest in recruiting local talent to attend medical school at the IU School of Medicine-Muncie. What is the BMD program and how is it making an impact?

  Our numbers demonstrate that if we train local students, we are more likely to retain them as physicians in the community. With this in mind, we created the BMD (Bachelors/Medical Doctor) program in a collaboration between BSU and IUSM-Muncie.

  Being across the street from BSU, our BMD students have incredible access to our medical school and facilities including our medical students, research, teaching faculty, residents, community physicians, and our staff. Next year, our first BMD class will become seniors at Ball State who will transition to the IUSM-Muncie the following year to complete medical school before they start residency. This program sets up Muncie to have a continuous physician training pipeline starting from high school students and extending all the way to board-certified physicians. So far, six of our former students will be joining the IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital Residency Programs in July of 2024.

• A distinctive aspect of an IUSM-M education is a focus on health promotion and disease prevention. As you look to the future, why is this important?

  My goal is to train physicians for the future of healthcare. When we started Optimus Primary, healthcare was firmly in a “fee for service” model, meaning physicians are paid for each service provided. The American Medical Association has forecasted that “lifestyle medicine” will be among the top five rapidly growing areas in medicine. With support from Ball Brothers Foundation, we’ve shifted our model to prioritize our students prescribing and advocating for patient outcomes.

  We focused on the idea that nearly 80% of health care costs are related to chronic disease and nearly 80% of chronic disease is a result of modifiable lifestyle risk factors.

  This is why we target health promotion and disease prevention in our unique training program, invest in an interprofessional Healthy Lifestyle Clinic, and ask our medical students to live a prevention-oriented lifestyle by enrolling them in the Adult Fitness Program at the Fisher Institute of Health and Well-Being at BSU. Each medical student is offered a comprehensive physical fitness and health assessment and then provided an individualized exercise prescription that is consistent with his/her individual goals aimed at improving both their overall health and mental wellbeing.

• East Central Indiana has undergone major changes over the past several decades. For nearly a century, much of our region’s identity was rooted in manufacturing. Today, educational institutions and healthcare organizations are the major “anchor institutions” in our region. Why are you optimistic about the future of East Central Indiana?

  I am highly optimistic about the future of East Central Indiana as our anchor institutions have increasingly invested in the health and economic development of our community, leveraging our community assets through mutually beneficial partnerships. This is exactly what we are seeing with investments in community infrastructure and education/health care assets through BSU, IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital, Meridian Health Services, Ivy Tech, and IUSM-Muncie.

  My optimism also stems from the success we have seen thus far. When we first approached Ball Brothers Foundation, we proposed a complex and difficult task with a potential generational timeline to see the benefits. Our long-term vision included innovations such as:

  • Keeping students in Muncie for medical training and into our residency programs: We now have ten residents training in our residency programs from IUSM-Muncie since we started Optimus Primary.

  • Engaging our students to improve health behaviors in our community as an initial and necessary step to improving health outcomes: In 2017, The Robert Wood Johnson County Health Rankings rated Delaware County 88th out of the 92 Indiana counties for Health Behaviors, we now rank 60th.

  Both outcomes are ahead of what I would have predicted and indicate a bright future for our region.

“Our collective ability to improve our community when our anchor institutions are aligned around a common goal is extraordinarily powerful for economic development and creating an identity for our region.” 

– Derron Bishop
Associate Dean of the IU School of Medicine-Muncie