Marolee Neuberger, MS, named director
of MSU Family Medicine Residency Program Network

Marolee Neuberger, MS, has been named director of the MSU Family Medicine Residency Program Network for the Department of Family Medicine. As director, she will provide a leadership role for the Network, focusing on collaborative work with the nine program directors, faculty, and staff. Together, they will identify pertinent goals and action steps which will improve graduate medical education in Michigan. Her duties include coordination of meetings, retreats, educational workshops, faculty exchanges and other networking opportunities across the residency programs and department. She will also develop educational and promotional materials and assist in curriculum development as needed in collaboration with program and department. The Family Medicine Residency Network is a collaborative of nine family medicine residency programs affiliated with MSU which includes over 200 residents and 100 faculty members.

During the next three months, she looks forward to visiting each residency program to meet the director and faculty. While there, she hopes to discuss ways in which she can offer support through her role as director.

Neuberger brings a strong background in the delivery of educational programs and services within health care organizations and medical education programs. She earned her MS in education from Iowa State University. Her work has focused on strategies to address gaps in provider-patient communication that are influenced by issues of health literacy. She has extensive experience in quality improvement, patient safety, educational tool development, and clinical training.

She was on the faculty at the Toledo Hospital W.W. Knight Family Medicine Residency Program, where she was responsible for curriculum in the areas of preventive medicine, health promotion, and patient education as well as implementation of a preventive health services program into the delivery of services for the clinic practice.

Much of her work has been in the redesign of organizational processes to address issues of health literacy in rural and underserved populations. When working with the Western Michigan Area Health Education Center, she worked with interdisciplinary groups of health profession students on projects that integrated health literacy strategies when working with chronic disease patients, smoking reduction, and childhood immunizations. She served as adjunct faculty at Western Michigan University’s Physician Assistant program to trial the integration of a health literacy curriculum within their program. She also serves on the National AHEC Health Literacy Task Group to help develop an action plan for the implementation of health literacy projects into the training curriculum.

Since 2003, she has been worked with the Michigan State Medical Society “Health Literacy: Train the Trainer” program, presenting the program throughout Michigan to various health care organizations and provider groups. She also is coauthor of “Literacy and Misunderstanding of Prescription Drug Labels,” published in 2006 in the Annals of Internal Medicine and of “A Critical Review of FDA-Approved Medication Guides,” in Patient Education and Counseling.

Neuberger can be reached at marolee.neuberger@hc.msu.edu or 517-884-0439.