About
Dennis H. Novack, MD is a professor of medicine and an associate dean of medical education at Drexel University College of Medicine, overseeing clinical skills teaching and assessment. He is a general internist who completed a two-year fellowship with George Engel’s Medical-Psychiatric Liaison group in Rochester, N.Y. from 1976 through 1978. He was a founding member and leader in the Academy on Communication in Healthcare (ACH) for many years since its inception in 1979. He was one of the founding directors of the first several ACH annual national faculty development courses in 1983, which have continued until the present, and have trained thousands of faculty members who teach physician-patient communication in medical education. He founded and edited Medical Encounter, the quarterly newsletter of the Academy, for twenty years.
Dr. Novack has conducted educational research, developed curricula and written many articles in peer-reviewed journals about physician-patient communication, a number of which are used in various medical school curricula. He has also authored or co-authored articles on controversial topics in medical ethics, such as his articles in JAMA on "telling" the cancer patient and on physician use of deception in medicine. He has made many presentations at national and international meetings, and has been invited to serve at several consensus conferences on teaching physician-patient communication, including the Toronto Consensus Conference, whose conclusions were published in the British Medical Journal; two Kalamazoo conferences published in Academic Medicine; and an Institute of Medicine committee on the ideal behavioral sciences curriculum for medical education.