This elective is site specific with site specific learning objectives. This elective allows students to experience the challenges of health care delivery with a required physician supervisor/ evaluator in an underserved international setting for 2-4 weeks.

The elective’s goal is to provide an introduction into academic medicine to those students interested in teaching and/or research primarily in the area of simulation. Students will be exposed to the potential and operational use of simulation or other media for education, clinical training and research. Over the course of the elective, students will be required to develop an education plan, compose a simulation scenario that meets the educational goals created, execute the educational activity including any materials necessary including assessment tools as well as facilitate debriefing. For those students primarily interested in educational research, the course director and coordinator will assist in providing guidance and support in the students’ area of interest as well as guide the student to present their findings in an appropriate venue whether it is a conference presentation and/or peer reviewed journal.

The elective’s goal is to provide instruction/training for students in scientific/medical writing. Students will be expected to formulate a manuscript proposal, usually based on a care report format and to complete research/literature reviews in a chosen topic area. Students will work with relevant faculty in developing their plan and will receive instruction on manuscript preparation, formatting, referencing, copyediting, etc. Students will also receive instruction on manuscript submission processes, manuscript review and other aspects of the publication process.

The Health Law elective rotation is designed to provide the MD/JD candidate an overview into the interface between law and medicine. Legal implications in the field of medicine occur almost daily, and having the background in law will vastly enhance a medical student's, and practitioner's, grasp of the expansive responsibilities in one's medical career.

The one month Independent Study MD/JD Elective would allow the TTUHSC student enrolled in the MD/D Program an opportunity to prepare and take the Texas State Bar Exam.

Ultrasound (US) has become an indispensable diagnostic imaging modality because of it's real-time capability, noninvasiveness, portability, and relatively low cost. This resulted from the fact that imaging with US does not carry the risk associated with the administration of intravenous contrast material or the potential hazards of ionizing radiation. Therefore, many medical and surgical subspecialties have embraced the use of US as an adjunct to or extension of the physical examination. Some have referred to it as the "sonoscope." Others have described US as "the visual stethoscope of the 21st century" The use of US beyond its traditional role with the department of radiology has been termed "point of care" US.

This course will provide the students an introduction to health care policy. They will learn to follow bills through the legislative process to statutes and then follow the statue to rulemaking at the agency level. The student will learn advocacy from different perspectives and be able to discuss the governance of public health agencies. They will be introduced to the process of writing a white paper for government use.

This fourth year elective course will provide medical students with an intensive study of the Medical Humanities and their relation to the practice of medicine through an immersion experience in the medical humanities. The goal of this course is to provide students with a broad exposure to medical humanities including history, literature, art history, media studies, philosophy, law, ethics, religion, theology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and other arts and sciences-to study (a) the context of medicine, (b) the experience of medicine, (c) the goals of medicine, and (d) concepts in and of medicine. It is expected that students will spend 15-20 hours a week on reading assignments and 15 hours per week in seminar discussion.

This two week, 2-credit elective is designed to provide the fourth-year medical student with the basic competencies in 3D modeling and printing using medical imaging data. The student will assess medical scan data to determine the appropriate method for the 3D conversion. Collaboratively, the student explores applications of relational thinking as it applies to the 3D modeling process and everyday medical practice. At the end of the rotation, the student is given a case-study to examine, diagnose and develop a 3D application for the prognosis.

Correctional Healthcare involves more than just seeing a freedom impaired patient. Providing care of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prisoners involves health care policy at a state level, medical needs that must be met in conjunction with security, transportation and safety both the patient and the health care provider and a strict quality program that meets statute. During this two week rotation, the student will spend one week with administration who administer a $125M per year contract. This will involve policy meetings along with meetings with security, medical, pharmacy and psychiatry providers. The student will also have formal training in the techniques of providing telemedicine. The second week will involve 2 ½ days seeing and understanding the growing psychiatric needs of these patients and 2 ½ days understanding how a hospital is managed inside a state prison. The student will have the opportunity to review a new text book on Health Systems Science.

During this course, learners will gain insight into the admissions process as it relates to the evaluation of applications. This elective will demonstrate how evaluators review medical school applications. You will learn about the mission, vision, and values that encompass our holistic review process, as well as what competitive applicants look like. In this course, you will be aiding the Office of Admissions in evaluating applications and rendering decisions for an interview for the upcoming entry-year class.

Search Strategies for Medical Professionals is a course designed to promote savvy information seeking strategies and skill-sets among health care professionals. The class is built to support strategic on-line information seeking behaviors and overall on-line information literacy. In lieu of the vast quantities of information available on the Internet coupled with the growing number of predatory publishers, these two complimentary goals are necessary to equip medical professionals in obtaining quality on-line information. Goals will be achieved through a lecture and/or videos or a combination of these two mediums as ell as through a homework assignment and a final exam.

This course will provide Phase 3 medical students with an awareness of important historical personalities, concepts, and events as they relate to modern medicine. Emphasis on setting the practice of medicine and the experience of health and disease into broad social, economic, and political context will be made. Students will be asked to create a short paper on a topic of their choice. This may include an aspect about a medical specialty they plan to enter, a particular disease, or a healthcare provider that they wish to explore in greater detail. Clinical TTUHSC faculty and medical historians will facilitate interdisciplinary discussion and reflection on a range of history of medicine topics from antiquity to the present day.

The current pandemic caused by SARS-Cov-2 is an unprecedented public health emergency that has touched all aspects of our society. This course will invite medical students to explore aspects of the pandemic and the virus that has caused it, to apply public health, epidemiology, and evidence-based medicine tools to the current situation and to discuss impacts on health policy, the economy, and wellness.