Highland Chief of Medicine Earns Elite "Mastership" Recognition

Robert McCann, M.D., has been selected as one of 55 U.S. physicians to receive Mastership recognition from the American College of Physicians for 2014-2015. ACP is a national organization of more than 100,000 board-certified internists. Masters are selected for making significant contributions to the field of medicine and demonstrating high achievement in research, education, health care initiatives, volunteerism or administrative positions.

McCann, a resident of Pittsford, is Chief of Medicine at Highland Hospital and a Professor of Medicine at the University of Rochester. He is CEO of Accountable Health Partners, a clinically integrated network that includes independent community practitioners from around the region, as well as physicians from the University of Rochester Medical Faculty Group (URMFG).

 

McCann is board-certified in geriatrics, hospice and palliative care, and internal medicine. He earned his medical degree and completed his internship at SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. McCann completed his residency at Rochester General Hospital and began practicing there in 1987; among his achievements, he established a social and medical day care program for older adults known as PACE that has since been replicated nationwide.

Since joining Highland Hospital in 1999, McCann has led the development of the hospital’s nationally recognized geriatric medicine program, which has the largest number of geriatric medicine specialists in upstate New York. Under McCann’s leadership, Highland has implemented innovations in geriatric care, including:

 

·    Developing a palliative care service that has earned “center of excellence” recognition from The Joint Commission, an independent, not-for-profit organization that accredits and certifies more than 20,500 health care organizations and programs in the United States

·    Launching Highland’s Hospital Elder Life Program, the first such program of its kind in the area, which uses personalized interventions and activities to reduce delirium and improve outcomes in elder patients

·     Introducing geriatric-specific services in oncology, orthopaedics and emergency medicine that address the specific physical, cognitive and emotional needs of seniors to improve their care. An example is Highland’s Geriatric Fracture Center, which partners geriatricians with orthopaedic surgeons to co-manage older patients’ fragility fractures; the approach improves patient outcomes, shortens hospital stays and reduces cost of care. Along with Stephen Kates, M.D. and Daniel Mendelson, M.D., co-directors of Highland’s Geriatric Fracture Center, McCann has traveled around the world teaching the approach to physicians in Asia, South America and Europe.

McCann has served as director of Highland’s multimillion-dollar, five-year grant from the R.J. Reynolds Foundation to advance geriatric care. Highland has used Reynolds grant funds to expand geriatric teaching for non-geriatric specialists in hospitalist medicine, orthopaedics and emergency medicine. The program is a response to the growing shortage of geriatricians in the United States and the need to ensure that non-geriatricians are better prepared to care for the country’s growing population of older adults in the decades to come.

 

With Reynolds grant funds, Highland also created a “Hospital to Home” geriatric teaching  program for medical residents. Residents are filmed while seeing patients in the hospital, then during visits to their homes after their discharge. Residents and their clinical instructors view the videos in a class setting to critique the effectiveness of care – particularly the usefulness of medications residents have prescribed. McCann got the idea for the program after seeing a resident write nearly 20 different prescriptions for one elderly patient.

An advocate for more judicious use of medications and medical procedures for seniors, he has been quoted in USA Today and other national publications on how health care providers should focus on “better care, not necessarily more care” to improve quality of care and quality of life for elders. His care of nuns facing end-of-life issues at the Sisters of St. Joseph nursing home was featured in a 2009 New York Times article.

 

He will receive his Mastership award in April 2015 at the ACP’s annual meeting in Boston.

McCann and his family live in Pittsford.