Advisors

DrossmanCare has advisors who provide guidance in their specialty areas:

Dennis H. Novack, MD
Educational Advisor

Dr. Novack is a Professor of Medicine and an Associate Dean of Medical Education at Drexel University College of Medicine. (DUCOM)  He is a general internist who completed a 2-year fellowship with George Engel’s Medical-Psychiatric Liaison group in Rochester, N.Y. 1976-1978.

Since 1978 Dr. Novack has worked in academic medical centers, dedicated to improving education in physician-patient communication and psychosocial aspects of care. At DUCOM he oversees clinical skills teaching and assessment, and directs the first year medical student course on medical interviewing, as well as the doctoring curriculum in the medicine residency.  He has conducted educational research, developed curricula and written many articles about physician-patient communication, a number of which are used in various medical school curricula.  He has been a leader in the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare (AACH) since its inception in 1979.

Dr. Novack was one of the founding directors of the first several AACH 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.  He is currently first editor of doc.com, a comprehensive online resource on healthcare communication, a joint project of the AACH and DUCOM.

Dr. Novack has been in the leadership for many years in the American Psychosomatic Society (APS), a scholarly society of nearly a 1,000 members that fosters scientific research into mind-body interactions in health and disease.  He is a Past President of the APS.

Lin Chang, MD
Advisor

Lin Chang, MD, is a Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine, Division of Digestive Diseases, at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Neurobiology of Stress at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. This center is an interdisciplinary research and education organization, dedicated to the study of brain-body interactions in health and disease.

Dr. Chang’s clinical expertise is in functional gastrointestinal disorders which include irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic constipation, and functional dyspepsia. She is Director of the Intestinal Disorders Clinic at UCLA. She has had a longstanding interest in provider-patient communication and served as a faculty member of the Rome-AGA Communication Skills workshop and for the Rome Global Conference workshop on cross-cultural communication skills. She is a funded NIH-investigator studying the central and peripheral mechanisms underlying IBS. She is the recipient of the Janssen Award in Gastroenterology for Basic or Clinical Research and the AGA Distinguished Clinician Award. Dr. Chang has authored more than 70 original research articles, 48 review articles, and 19 book chapters on her specialty interests and is a frequent speaker at national and international meetings. She is a fellow of the American Gastroenterological Association and the American College of Gastroenterology. She is also a member of the Rome Foundation Board of Directors. She is the President of the American Neurogastroenterology and Motility Society (ANMS). She served on the FDA GI Advisory Committee from 2005-2010 which she also chaired.