University of Virginia Health System

The Campaign for Medical Education at UVa will raise $30 million to construct the Claude Moore Medical Education Building. The building, already supported by a $12.5 million challenge grant by the Claude Moore Charitable Foundation and $3 million from the School of Medicine, will feature the latest innovations to accommodate a variety of learning styles, including groundbreaking technology to aid instruction.

The state-of-the-art teaching facility will assist the School of Medicine in attracting the best and brightest medical students and ensuring them of an education informed by the latest teaching methods and technologies. In addition, the building will support a focus on clinical medical education that fosters collaboration, builds patient care skills, and teaches appropriate use of information technology in the clinic.

The new building will include a high-tech Medical Simulation Training Center and a Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) classroom similar to one pioneered by Microsoft Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The building will also include a Clinical Skills Teaching and Assessment Center in which students can be observed and videotaped while working with standardized patients to refine their exams and interactions.  Finally, the School of Medicine plans to take advantage of new virtual reality technology under development in the UVa School of Architecture to create an exciting teaching tool that will ultimately offer students a three-dimensional view of medicine.

Designed for Learning
The new Claude Moore Medical Education Building will address the following needs:

• Consolidate programs housed in buildings across the Health System.  The newest of these, Jordan Hall, is 30 years old; some buildings date to the 1930s.
• Construct facilities for a Clinical Skills Teaching and Assessment Center and small- and large-group interaction. Currently, faculty offer clinical instruction in the University Hospital, borrowing space after hours.
• Incorporate 21^st-century technologies, including individual wireless communication and classrooms with multimedia capabilities.
• Create a Medical Simulation Training Center employing virtual reality and equipped with computerized mannequins programmed to simulate illness.