HPM welcomes students, faculty members from Germany’s University of Bayreuth
March 9, 2019
The UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s Department of Health Policy and Management welcomed 26 guests from the University of Bayreuth, in Bayreuth, Germany, on March 4-6.
Bruce Fried, PhD, associate professor of health policy and management at the Gillings School, and Andreas Schmid, PhD, faculty member in the University of Bayreuth’s health management and health economics department, organized the trip to UNC this year. Schmid also is an alumnus of the program, having visited UNC for six months in 2005, when he was a master’s student.
The visit continued a 15-year academic collaboration between the University of Bayreuth and the universities of North Carolina, Missouri and Michigan. Each year, each of the three U.S. universities hosts as many as six master’s degree students from the German university and helps organize a biennial study trip to the United States. On alternating years, students from the three U.S. universities travel to Germany to tour the German health care system, visiting both Bayreuth and Berlin.
The interactions between UNC and the University of Bayreuth have resulted in a number of student and faculty collaborations, including several publications resulting from the study trips and student exchanges.
“This has been an enriching experience for both faculty members and students,” Fried said. “The relationship has been a model for an effective and continued cross-border academic collaboration and has led to sustained academic partnerships between our universities.”
The Gillings School’s Dr. Bruce Fried (farthest left) poses with visitors from Germany’s University of Bayreuth on March 4. Dr. Andreas Schmid is to Dr. Fried’s left, in a red tie.
Among participating UNC Gillings School health policy and management faculty were Morris Weinberger, PhD, Vergil N. Slee Distinguished Professor of Healthcare Quality Management and department chair; Bruce Fried, PhD, associate professor; Pam Silberman, JD, DrPH, professor and director of the department’s executive doctoral program in health leadership; Sandra B. Greene, DrPH, Professor of the Practice of Health Policy and Jonathan Oberlander, PhD, professor of health policy and management and professor and chair of the UNC School of Medicine’s Department of Social Medicine.
Lectures by the faculty members on the first morning of the students’ visit were followed by an afternoon tour of UNC Hospitals’ Hillsborough campus, led by Jeff Strickler, vice president of UNC Hospitals’ Hillsborough campus, and a lecture by Chris Ellington, president of the UNC Health Care Network Hospital and executive vice president and chief financial officer at UNC Hospitals.
On March 5, the group toured UNC’s main campus and visited the Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina campus in Durham, where several speakers made presentations about artificial intelligence and machine learning, health insurance differences for U.S. citizens, compared with members of the European Union, and the impact of the Affordable Care Act.
On March 6, the student tour visited the N.C. Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance, where they attended presentations by Angela Yochem, executive vice president and chief digital and technical officer for Novant Health, and clinician Karen Smith, MD.
Students completed their North Carolina trip by visiting N.C. State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, where Sid Thakur, PhD, MVSc, the College’s director of global health and professor of molecular epidemiology, described the College’s One Health/One Medicine Research Initiative.
Contact the Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@listserv.unc.edu.
