Abraham Nussbaum, Postbac ’99, is the author of Progress Notes: One Year in the Future of Medicine. Published this fall by Johns Hopkins Press, the book follows a group of medical students who train by following patients instead of physicians in a longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) model at Denver Health, where Nussbaum is the Chief Educational Officer.
Accompanying them to primary care appointments, emergency room visits, and procedures, the students develop deep connections with the patients and see the healthcare system through their eyes, charting a new future for medical education and training.
We asked Nussbaum more about his book, about the Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program training at Bryn Mawr, and how it changed his life in many ways—most of all by leading him to cross paths with his wife, Elin Kondrad '99.
Tell us about yourself and what brought you to medicine.
I grew up in Colorado and went to college at Swarthmore. I wanted a rigorous liberal arts school training, and I wanted to live in a beautiful place. There’s something really beautiful about a Pennsylvania spring.
I studied religion and English lit there—I had no intention of going to med school, but I had a classmate who become very ill, and I saw how people fall out of the human community when they get sick. I was headed on a pathwa
