Dr. Walt Hollow:
A Pioneer on the Frontlines of Native American Medicine

Dr. Hollow's latest effort is to try and find the funding to develop an American Indian Institute of Health that would be run in the summer, and that would be designed particularly for Indian students who didn't have any access to Indian healthcare issues during their medical education.

"I see the Institute running for four to six weeks during the summer," he says, "and those Indian medical students would come up and, basically, get my Indian health class, get my Indian problem-based learning class and participate in one of our Indian Health clerkships. I want to partner with the Association of American Indian Physicians and bring in Indian physicians who are experts in diabetes, cancer, heart disease, accidents and injuries, the most common health problems that are affecting the American Indian and where there is some health disparity.

"I want to make sure that this group of Indian medical students has access to the various Indian physicians that are really committed to Indian health issues. Because, you know, while I love to mentor Indian medical students, I think if I had forty students here it would hard for just me to be the only mentor. So having other Indian physicians involved on the faculty of the Institute would open up other mentors for those students. I mean, there are going to be students who might not be interested in family medicine, which is what my expertise is. They may be interested in being an internist, or maybe a surgeon. And they need to have access to Indian physicians that are in those specialties and have interests that they have so that they can be mentors to the students."

Over the course of his career, Hollow has done research in chronic disease, diabetes, and hypertension among the urban Indians at the Seattle Indian Health Board. His latest research interest focuses on medical education. Along with NACOE and research in the Department of Family Medicine, he recently completed a qualitative study of twenty Indian medical students to determine what characteristics are important for Indians to have to get into medical school.

"So we were interested in the pathway leading up to medical school and we asked them all kinds of questions about what was good, what was bad, what got in your way, and we just learned an immense amount of information," he says. "And so we're publishing a paper that's meant for medical schools on what strategies they need to be aware of to help Indians get into their medical school. Then we're doing a health policy paper that we want to send out. And that's going to go to health organizations like the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association (AMA), Indian health organizations, tribes, Tribal Councils and medical schools to help get Indians into medicine, and some of the policies and partnerships that they might want to consider if they want to attract Indians into their medical school."