Welcome to Stony Brook Internal Medicine Residency Training Program

lane
Susan Lane, MD, FACP
Residency Program Director
Vice Chair of Education

Program Director's Message

Welcome to Stony Brook University Hospital’s Department of Medicine Residency Training Program. I have been the Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program for the past 10 years, having previously directed our Primary Care Program and served as an Associate Program Director for 9 years. As a former clerkship director and as the current Vice Chair of Education, I understand how integral a well-run residency program is to the health and vitality of the academic mission of our medical center. Our Stony Brook Leaders, including the University President, Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University Dean, and the Chair of Medicine, are all dedicated to advancing our first-rate training program.               

I am delighted by your interest, and look forward to telling you more about Stony Brook Internal Medicine.

 

 

Goals of Our Program:

The Stony Brook Internal Medicine Program supports and guides residents as they develop and refine their professional identity during training. Our residency program supports all aspects of professional identity formation including acquiring knowledge and skills, promoting attitudes of humanism and compassion, fostering habits for well-being, providing mentorship and feedback, and cultivating a practice of reflection.  The specific goals of the program are that the Stony Brook trained physician:

  • Provides care that is compassionate, high-value, patient-centered care
  • Possesses skills for life-long learning and has an attitude of inquiry and discovery
  • Aspires to be a resilient leader and role model in the medical community
  • Possesses skills necessary to focus on harm prevention and strategies to mitigate medical errors
  • Practices self-care in order to maintain and foster wellbeing
  • Embraces diversity and honors the diverse needs of patients, families, staff, colleagues, and learners

Our Strengths

We are very proud of Stony Brook and all it has to offer our trainees. Our three-year Medicine Residency program, fully accredited by the ACGME, offers tremendous patient diversity and clinical opportunities. We provide a robust academic environment that achieves a balance between the intensely clinical and analytical facets of medical practice and the reflective and rewarding aspects of direct patient care. Highlights of our program include:

A “closed-faculty” system: a supportive learning environment where our teaching attendings are always readily available to guide and support our residents. A “closed-faculty” system ensures that the same attending is responsible for all of the patient care and teaching for the internal medicine teaching teams. The effort of tracking down multiple attendings is removed and collegial relationships with faculty flourish.

Resident Testimonials:

An Innovative Schedule that Improves the Educational and Clinical Experiences 

A “4 +1” system
Our residents participate in a block scheduling system consisting of four weeks of ward, elective, or ICU clinical duties, followed by one week of continuity clinic. This scheduling eliminates the inevitable conflict between the inpatient and outpatient areas, while significantly enhancing opportunities for personal growth and improving the quality of life for our residents. Additionally, the block scheduling improves the educational and clinical experience in our residents’ continuity clinics, giving our residents a true experience of the pleasure and value of primary care medicine.

Academic Wednesdays
This is a full day of educational activities structured toward the learning needs of our residents. Each learning activity is developed with intentional pedagogy to promote active learning, teamwork, and collaboration in a supportive learning environment. We de-emphasize the use of passive power point didactics, focusing instead on engaging a variety of active learning techniques centering around small group facilitated learning. Some examples of our teaching methodology include: (1) team-based learning; (2) jigsaw model; (3) think-pair-share; (4) case method teaching; and (5) roundtable discussions/reflections. To promote continuity in learning and foster new skills development in each successive Post Graduate Year (PGY), our educational activities comprise structured, longitudinal curricula with specific learning objectives that are tailored to each PGY level.

Dedication to Patient Care Duties  
We ensure that a vast majority of a resident’s daily routine is devoted towards focused patient care. The morning hours (7A to 12N) are a critical period of time for clinical learning. During this time, our residents are learning new patient cases and are engaged in bedside teaching rounds to construct and implement management plans for their patients. Our formal resident report is conducted Monday, Tuesday, and Friday at 1:00 p.m. This timing allows residents to focus on patient care and bedside teaching in the morning hours. Structured didactics covering a variety of core internal medicine topics are integrated into the Academic Wednesday curriculum and Wednesday and Thursday core conference. Dedicated cardiology didactics are delivered daily in the cardiology critical care (CCU) and step-down (CACU) units. Additionally, we have implemented two designated resident admitters stationed in the emergency room to conduct admissions from 7A to 12N (EA - Early Admitter and LA - Late Admitter). These residents admit to the general medicine and medical oncology teaching teams and cardiac acute care (CACU) teams, ensuring that the senior residents on those teams can lead uninterrupted teaching rounds with their team. 

Two outstanding teaching hospitals

Stony Brook University Hospital 
Stony Brook University Hospital is a tertiary care academic medical center and is the only referral hospital for Suffolk County. Residents are exposed to a wide array pathology with from the New York City to the Hampton Bays population. There is tremendous ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in our patient population. 

Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center
The Northport Veterans Affairs Medical center is committed to providing our veterans with world-class benefits and services they have earned. This hospital is situated on a beautiful golf course on the North Shore of Long Island in Northport. 

At both of our teaching hospitals, residents learn by caring for patients with common problems and rare syndromes, enabling our graduates to practice with confidence anywhere, in any situation. We are nationally recognized as leaders in quality health care and have state-of-the art centers in cardiac care, oncology, digestive disorders, and neuroscience. Stony Brook has an academic affiliation with two nearby renowned research facilities, Cold Spring Harbor and the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Unwavering emphasis on the teaching mission
A valuable aspect of our teaching mission is to maximize the time available for bedside teaching rounds, practicing evidence-based medicine and the pursuit of scholarly endeavors including outcomes research, clinical trials, investigator-initiated clinical research, and educational research. These opportunities are made possible by our substantial attending directed hospitalist program, which allows us to “off-load” the inpatient resident services, and maintain our census caps well below the ACGME limits. Our residents author projects presented at National and International Society meetings and scholarly publications in peer-reviewed journals.

A fabulous place to live
Suffolk County and the Stony Brook area are beautiful, safe environments with an abundance of nearby and easily accessible venues, including pristine beaches for surfers and sunbathers, and scenic bike trails for riders of all skill levels. Our charming villages, local wineries, and a wide variety of casual pubs and farm-to-table restaurants offer entertainment options for all tastes. With a world class University right across the road, you have ready access to film festivals, concerts, and sporting events. Our local school systems are nationally top-rated, with an annual slate of finalists and semifinalists for Intel and Siemens-Westinghouse science awards and National Merit Scholarships. New York City is a 1.5 hour drive and ferry service to Connecticut makes for easy access to New England destinations.

Exceptional career preparation
Whether you plan a career in a subspecialty of internal medicine or general medicine, primary care or hospital medicine, private practice or academics, Stony Brook Internal Medicine Residency will give you the knowledge to deliver high quality and high value patient-centered care. We will help you develop the necessary skills to become a compassionate and observant physician and a life-long learner. Our focus on quality and safety will enable you to develop the necessary expertise to become a leader in 21st century medical care delivery. Our graduates go on to train in highly competitive fellowship programs, while others pursue careers in both hospitalist and ambulatory settings in academic and private practice settings. 

An upbeat, caring experienced administrative staff
Our administrative staff is committed to supporting you during your residency. I invite you to visit and explore what we have to offer!
 

About Dr. Lane: 
Dr. Lane is Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program, Vice Chair of Education, and Professor of Medicine.

"I attended Amherst College and earned a B.A. in Biology. After teaching 9th and 10th grade French and Biology and coaching field hockey and lacrosse for a few years after college, I completed a post-baccalaureate year at Bryn Mawr College and then attended the University of Connecticut School of Medicine where I met my husband, Dr. Andrew Lane. We moved to Rochester, NY where I trained in internal medicine at Strong Memorial Hospital. After residency I joined Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates where I was in private practice in Wellesley, Massachusetts and covered Vanguard inpatient teaching service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I joined the Stony Brook Medicine faculty in 2000, working in both the inpatient and outpatient settings. I became Associate Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program and Director of the Primary Care Track in 2004. In 2007 I was asked to develop and direct a new Ambulatory Clerkship for the School of Medicine, which I co-directed until 2013, when I became Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency Program. 

Teaching has been a life-long pursuit of mine and I am happiest when I am able to help a student, a resident, or a patient understand a new topic or work on a solution to a problem. I am passionate about communication and the essential role it plays in medicine. I am interested in healthcare policy and serve on several health policy committees. My research focuses on medical education and Graduate Medical Education funding reform. I currently serve as the Vice Chair for the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine.

Andy and I are the proud parents of three sons, a cat and dog, and we live in East Setauket, NY. "