Appendix A: Medical School Information
CUNY School of Medicine/Sophie Davis Biomedical Education Program
Specific programmatic emphases, strengths, mission/goal(s) of the medical school:
The CUNY School of Medicine (CSOM) is a mission-driven, seven-year combined BS/MD
program, located on the campus of the City College of New York in Harlem. Students are
admitted to the Sophie Davis Biomedical Education Program (SBE) upon graduating from high
school and engage in an accelerated BS degree program and then advance directly into our four-
year MD curriculum. The mission of CSOM/SBE is to produce broadly educated, highly skilled
medical practitioners to provide quality health services to communities historically underserved
by primary care physicians. This mission includes the recruitment of a diverse, talented pool of
students, expanding access to medical education to individuals from underserved communities,
of limited financial resources, and of racial/ethnic backgrounds historically underrepresented in
the medical profession. Our unique curriculum includes early formative clinical experiences that
are introduced before the medical school years and capitalizes upon the rich socio-demographics
of the surrounding community. The goal is to produce future clinicians who value and promote
the tenets of equity and access.
Unusual characteristics of the medical school’s educational program:
CSOM/SBE builds on the 40+ year history of the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education,
which was a five-year program. Students were accepted directly from high school and spent five
years at the college, during which they completed the BS degree and the curriculum
requirements for the traditional first two years of medical school. Upon completion of the five-
year program, students were matched to cooperating medical schools as third-year medical
students and completed their MD degree at the cooperating school. Beginning with the class that
entered CSOM in Fall 2013, the school, having received LCME accreditation, began providing
the third and fourth years of medical school education. The only entry point to the CUNY School
of Medicine is through the Sophie Davis Biomedical Education Program, the BS portion of the
seven-year program. Our major clinical partners are St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx and
Staten Island University Hospital on Staten Island. We graduated our first class of MDs in May
2020.
The School’s curriculum takes full advantage of the seven-year continuum to educate future
physicians with a firm grounding in population health and community-oriented primary care.
One highlight of this commitment is a four-year Practice of Medicine (POM) course sequence
that includes a three-year Longitudinal Clinical Experience (LCE) in which students are placed
each year in the same primary care practice site. The Department of Community Health and
Social Medicine offers a five-year course sequence that includes Introduction to Population
Health and Community Oriented Primary Care, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Population
Health and Community Health Assessment, Evaluation in Health Care Settings, US Health Care
System, Evidence Based Medicine and Selectives in Population Health. These courses span the
BS and MD curriculum as do the foundational sciences courses. This holistic education prepares
our students to address the most important issues influencing healthcare delivery and also
prepares them to reduce healthcare disparities.