For the first time, Kaiser Permanente has honored three physicians at the same medical center, Santa Clara, with prestigious awards for teaching and research. The awards come from The Permanente Medical Group, which represents Kaiser Permanente’s 7,000 physicians in Northern California.
Dr. Daniel Tseng, who won the research award, noticed that most of his Asian American patients would develop a debilitating cough when taking a hypertension medicine. And, worse, they’d stop taking the pills that were protecting them from heart attacks. Dr. Tseng started asking questions.
“I found there was very little information about Asian Americans and this cough,” says the Internal Medicine specialist. So he started a first-ever study that showed because of the cough, Asian Americans were more than twice as likely to discontinue their life-saving medicine. It was published in the American Journal of Medicine.
For his research work showing that physicians need to consider ethnicity of patients when deciding on therapies, Dr. Tseng was awarded the Morris F Collen Award, named for one of Kaiser Permanente’s founding physicians.
Infectious Disease specialist Dr. Jonathan Blum was honored for his teaching excellence. All physicians must participate in Continuing Medical Education, or CME, and Dr. Blum is one of the leading educators in that program at Kaiser Permanente’s Santa Clara Medical Center.
Physicians at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara consider Dr. Blum the “go-to” guy for infectious disease information.
“Dr. Blum has the true characteristic of a great teacher—he always questions and listens,” said Dr. Stanford Shoor, a colleague at Santa Clara.
Also honored was Dr. David Levin, who for the past two decades has been training the Obstetrics and Gynecology residents at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara. The Santa Clara Medical Center is one of Kaiser Permanente’s four teaching hospitals in Northern California. So every Thursday Dr. Levin can be seen in the halls leading the young doctors around on what’s become the “Dr. David Levin Rounds.”
“My passion is education,” says Dr. Levin, “and I’m so glad it is sanctioned and welcomed here at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara.”
Dr. Levin began his career in Obstetrics and Gynecology graduating from the residency program at Santa Clara, and he now leads Graduate Medical Education or GME there. His award honors his teaching excellence in Graduate Medical Education. Under Dr Levin’s leadership, Santa Clara’s GME program has been honored nationally as an exemplary training program for future Ob-Gyn’s.
Dr. Levin is also “famed” at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara for his commute to work. Nearly every day for 32 years, he has ridden his bicycle to and from his home in the West Valley.
