Alumni Spotlight: HBS Alums Launch Ars Medica, a Nonprofit to Humanize the Culture of Medicine

Published

August 13, 2020

HBS alums, Marielle “Mari” Bugayong, MSPH ’19, and Javier de la Maza, MSPH ’19, share the story behind their nonprofit, Ars Medica – from launching the organization as HBS students to COVID-19’s impact on the group’s mission and vision.

Q: What first sparked your interest in public health?

Mari Bugayong: I first learned about public health when I was in college. Freshman fall, I took my first public health course – a seminar on people with disabilities that pushed me to reimagine how society could be structured more equitably. Since then, I’ve continued to study public health and reflect on how different aspects of my identity, like being a woman or an immigrant, have impacted my decisions and my health.

Another defining experience was the summer I volunteered to work with Health Leads. I was stationed at Rhode Island’s Hasbro Children’s Hospital in the pediatric primary care clinic. We worked with families with unmet needs, like housing instability or unemployment, to connect them to the community resources they needed. That’s when I really started to see the overlap between health and social determinants.

Javier de la Maza: My background is as a physician. I work in pediatric emergency care. During medical school, I had taken some public health courses, but at the time, I honestly didn’t feel a particular connection to public health. Those classes were focused on epidemiology and health systems, but I was more interested in storytelling and this human dimension of medicine.

When I first graduated from medical school, I worked as a primary care physician. I learned a lot about social determinants and the barriers patients were facing that hindered their ability to live productive and healthy lives. I also started to see opportunities to improve our communication with patients. So, my interest in storytelling evolved. I asked myself how I could combine my medical profession with my other interests, and that led me to explore public health, specifically health communication.

Q: What led you to HBS?

MB: I learned about the MSPH after my concentration advisor at Brown recommended that I explore different program options. Health Education & Health Communication best aligned with my existing interests, including social determinants, community engagement, and cancer health disparities.

JM: Realizing that health communication was a thing was an amazing moment. However, I soon found out that in Chile and Latin America, there weren’t graduate programs in health communication. The majority of the programs were in the U.S.

It seemed far-fetched to think that I could go all across the world for graduate school, but I ultimately did pursue a degree. During my program search, I came across the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and HBS. When the time came to apply for schools, Hopkins was my first choice.

Q: When you were MSPH students, you came up with an idea to launch an organization called Ars Medica. How would you describe Ars Medica’s mission?

JM: Ars Medica is about sparking a movement to humanize the medical profession. We hope to change norms in medicine, especially promoting help-seeking behavior and peer support.

We’ve framed Ars Medica around a multi-level approach to intervention: an online community, training programs, and outreach programs. We just launched our online community. Through our training programs, we want to give medical students an opportunity to acquire competencies they’re not getting through traditional training in medicine, such as communication and social-emotional skills. With our outreach programs, we hope to develop activities that foster collaboration between medical schools and drive the adoption of new approaches to enhance the medical curriculum.

Q: What inspired the idea for Ars Medica?

JM: I started creating films in medical school. I was very interested in this human dimension of medicine and wanted to hear other doctors’ thoughts, so I went out and interviewed them.

The testimonies they shared made it clear that the driving force that connects all doctors is this very humanistic desire to help another person. Despite that, the physicians I interviewed all identified this gap in the way we are trained, in the med school curriculum and in residency, emphasizing that we don’t pay enough attention to the human connection. That inspired me to try and do something to respond to that gap, but I didn’t really know what or how.

Q: How did coming to JHSPH and HBS influence Ars Medica’s development?

JM: When I moved to Baltimore with my wife and two kids, I went with one goal: learn about health communication. When I arrived at Hopkins, however, I found myself in this environment with people so passionate about new ideas. It only took a couple conversations about doing something to humanize medicine to get people excited. Very quickly, I met Mari. We both had a lot of common interests and felt very passionate about social innovation and the medical humanities.

We came together as a team and started to think about this idea and come up with a shared vision for a nonprofit designed to nurture the personal and professional growth of physicians.

Q: How have you leveraged your MSPH background in your work with Ars Medica?

MB: The classes we took as master’s students shaped our mindset and what we wanted Ars Medica to look like. One really influential class was Program Planning for Behavior Change, which was taught by Dr. Vanya Jones and Dr. Ryan Kennedy and helped us realize the need to have conversations with medical students and administrators about their needs.

Another key class was Health Literacy, taught by Dr. Debra Roter, which helped us to think about our audience, which is composed of all adult learners, and ensuring that our messaging conveys useful and relevant information in plain language.

Implementation and Sustainability of Community-Based Programs by Dr. Janice Bowie and Dr. Chidinma Ibe taught us about the importance of engaging the community. It also sparked broader conversations about how to sustain and scale our organization.

JM: I would also mention the Health Communication Programs course taught by Dr. Doug Storey, who is my mentor and now sits on the Ars Medica Advisory Board. In that class, we learned about strategic communication and how it can be applied to change knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes in people, issues we considered when developing our own programs.

Q: You mentioned earlier that Ars Medica launched an online community in August. Would you tell us more about what inspired the idea for the community and how it has evolved?

JM: Early on, it became clear to us that the heart of Ars Medica had to be an online community. We wanted a space for physicians, medical students, and residents from around the world to connect with each other.

We like to say the community was two years in the making. There were so many steps involved – from designing our branding to choosing a community manager. One critical challenge was finding a platform to host our community. We considered developing our own social networking site, but decided against it after realizing how expensive and risky that was.

We came across our current platform, which is hosted on a site called Mighty Networks, after listening to a podcast featuring the founder of the company based in California. After doing some research, we decided it would be the perfect space to host our community.

MB: Our online community operates like a social media platform, where members can connect and exchange stories. We post content and prompts three times per week to spark meaningful conversations. With time, the idea is that the community will also generate its own content.

Q: Would you talk a bit more about the strategy about the online community?

JM: We envision the online community as a safe space for physicians to exchange the knowledge they’ve gained from experience. We are building a community of practice, which works as an informal learning structure that allows people to share tacit knowledge.

We’ve centered the community around a value-based framework. Every month has a theme that explores different values. Last month, for example, we started with hope.

We’re also taking terminology that we find in medicine to create thought-provoking prompts, such as the anatomy of hope, and asking physicians to reflect on why it is important for our work as clinicians. We’re continually testing and learning, but we’re confident that our framework will be engaging for our community members.

Q: How has COVID-19 affected Ars Medica?

MB: We believe our work is even more relevant during the pandemic, given its impact on the medical community. Many of the challenges that were simmering before the pandemic have come to the forefront. One is the anxiety and exhaustion that physicians are facing.

We are creating a space where doctors and medical students come together to inspire and support each other on their journey towards a meaningful practice of medicine. For clinicians particularly hit by COVID, we felt it was important to give them this safe space to reflect, and so we took it upon ourselves to launch our online community as soon as possible.

We see the urgency of COVID-19 reflected in the first few themes that we have for our community, for example, hope and vulnerability. Through our themes, we want to give our community of physicians a space to reckon with the challenges we’re facing and recognize that doctors are human and need a space to connect.

Q: When you envision the future of Ars Medica, what do you hope to see?

MB: Overall, we’d like to position Ars Medica to become a thought leader in the medical humanities and develop resources to support physicians throughout their careers.

JM: The community is the heart of Ars Medica, but we are also looking to develop training programs. Our first is a joint venture with Mothership, another Baltimore-based organization. They work with health providers to promote communication skills.

The program we’re developing is called the “Physician’s Journey.” It’s a storytelling course to help participants explore their personal narrative, define their core values, and use that to shape their professional identity. It’s a five-week experience.

The plan is to pilot test the online version of the course through our platform. Eventually, we would like to scale the course and have live workshops that we can offer to large teaching hospitals and medical schools.

Outreach is another branch of Ars Medica that we’re looking to develop in the future. We are assessing the feasibility of hosting an annual event where we can encourage collaboration between medical schools in the Maryland and D.C. area. Our vision is to host a festival that brings together people working at the intersection of art, design, and medicine and give them an opportunity to disseminate their work.

This interview has been edited and compressed.